As enterprises increasingly adopt microservice architectures, the need for effective monitoring tools like distributed tracing becomes essential to manage the complexity and performance of these systems. Distributed tracing, as part of the three pillars of observability alongside logging and metrics, helps track latency and conduct root cause analysis across microservices. Elastic APM, built on the Elastic Stack, offers real-time application performance monitoring by collecting detailed data on requests and transactions, supporting distributed tracing with OpenTracing compliance. Despite challenges with standardization and interoperability among different tracing systems, initiatives like the OpenTracing specification and W3C Trace Context aim to create unified APIs and formats for better integration. Elastic APM facilitates compatibility through its OpenTracing bridge, allowing data from various tracers to be imported into its platform for comprehensive analysis, leveraging Elasticsearch's scalability for storing and visualizing tracing data. Additionally, Elastic APM Real User Monitoring captures client-side performance metrics, providing insights into real user experiences.