Distributed Tracing: Trace Context

This repository is associated with the Distributed Trace Context Community Group.

Specification for tracing context propagation format.

This repository follows the best practices from https://w3c.github.io/

Team Communication

Overview of team related communication channels

GitHub issues for any specification related issues
Mailing List for general discussions. Please subscribe to public-trace-context@w3.org
Gitter Channel to reach the team. TraceContext/Lobby
Public Google calendar for all meetings and events Google Calendar

Goal

This specification defines formats to pass trace context information across systems. Our goal is to share this with the community so that various tracing and diagnostics products can operate together.

Resources

Trace Context Report
Correlation Context Report
Working group charter (in W3C Advisory Committee review): https://www.w3.org/2018/04/distributed-tracing-wg-charter.html

Reference Implementations

TODO: add link here

Why are we doing this?

If this becomes popular, frameworks and other services will automatically pass trace IDs through for correlated requests. This would prevent traces from hitting dead ends when a request reaches an un-instrumented service.
Once aligned on a header name, we can ask for a CORS exception from the W3C. This would allow browsers to attach trace IDs to requests and submit tracing data to a distributed tracing service.
Loggers can reliably parse trace / span IDs and include them in logs for correlation purposes.
Customers can use multiple tracing solutions (Zipkin + New Relic) at the same time and not have to worry about propagating two sets of context headers.
Frameworks can bless access to the trace context even if they prevent access to underlying request headers, making it available by default.

Contributing

See Contributing.md for details

Editing report

Report is generated by ReSpec
To view report locally - start the local server like python -m SimpleHTTPServer to avoid cross-site file loading issue
You can preview report from your branch or fork http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/<organization or form name>/distributed-tracing/blob/<branch name>/report-trace-context.html. It is useful to review PR suggestions.

Other

Charter document for Working Group: https://w3c.github.io/distributed-tracing/charter.html

felixbarny/distributed-tracing