Distributed tracing is a method of recording connected operations across multiple services, allowing developers to pinpoint errors or performance bottlenecks in individual services that affect the overall system. Distributed tracing involves two fundamental components: spans, which describe an operation or work taking place on a service, and traces, which describe the end-to-end journey of one or more connected spans. Traces are linked together using a unique trace identifier and span identifiers, with the trace context being propagated between services to connect them. By attaching metadata describing operations, parent operations, and tracing identifiers, developers can augment logging and telemetry data to better understand the sequence of events in their distributed services, and tools like OpenTelemetry and Sentry provide libraries and APIs for instrumenting and exporting this data.