AI engineering glossary · MLOps, LLMOps cloud
What is distributed tracing?
Distributed tracing: Following one request as it passes through many services, recording each step as a span with its start time and duration. The connected spans show where time is spent or failures happen in complex systems.
Distributed tracing: an example
A trace of one chat request shows 20 ms in the gateway, 300 ms in retrieval and 2.1 s in the language model call.
Related terms
- Observability
- OpenTelemetry
- Span
- Correlation ID
More MLOps, LLMOps cloud terms
Where you learn it
Distributed tracing is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.