Vic Soares, a Director of Product Management at New Relic, discusses how W3C Trace Context is making distributed tracing easier to implement, more reliable, and ultimately more valuable for developers working with modern, highly distributed applications. This standard simplifies use cases where developers instrument services using tools from different distributed tracing solutions, enabling cross-vendor interoperation of traces. With the launch of support for W3C Trace Context in New Relic's APM agents, developers can now easily integrate their existing tracing tools and enjoy a more seamless observability experience within the New Relic platform. The standard defines two standardized context HTTP headers that serve to propagate context correlation information between services: `traceparent` and `tracestate`. This common format enables trace propagation across other trace instrumentation that conforms to the standard, clearing barriers for middleware vendors to support propagating trace headers, and for framework vendors to build in tracing instrumentation. By adopting W3C Trace Context, developers can overcome the challenges of mutually incompatible header formats and broken traces, leading to more flexibility and fewer barriers to observability. New Relic's open instrumentation initiative aligns with this standard, providing APIs, Telemetry SDKs, and exporters to meet customer needs for interoperation between vendors and open source tools. The company is committed to the W3C group and will continue to provide composable instrumentation solutions that seamlessly work with open standards.