The concept of observability and tracing in service meshes enables users to understand the performance, health, and failures of their services and networks. Observability helps identify where issues are occurring, while distributed tracing provides fine-grained details about connection requests, successes, retries, timeouts, and failures as they move through the data plane. Tracing systems like Zipkin or Jaeger collect key metadata from spans, which contain information such as tags, logs, and span context, to provide a visual output of the path and identify issues more easily. A service mesh like Consul enables users to extract Layer 7 data from applications and feed it into monitoring solutions, allowing for greater visibility into problem areas and helping eliminate issues before they become widespread.