Elastic APM adopts W3C TraceContext

Elastic APM has embraced the W3C TraceContext standard for context propagation in distributed tracing, which is crucial for monitoring microservice architectures by allowing different services to communicate and report their traces in a unified manner. Context propagation ensures that each service can uniquely identify and contribute to a trace, and adopting a unified format allows multiple APM vendors to monitor the same architecture without loss of observability. The W3C TraceContext specification, now a W3C recommendation, defines the traceparent and tracestate HTTP headers to facilitate this process, enabling services to report trace components and visualize them in a comprehensive trace view. Elastic APM was an early adopter of this standard and has updated its implementations to align with the official specification, allowing users to identify performance bottlenecks and errors by easily integrating with their applications.