Observability · Flashcard
What is a span in distributed tracing?
- AA single named, timed unit of work with start and end
- BThe full causal path of a request across many services
- CA key/value tag attached to describe a unit of work
- DA sampling rule that decides which traces to keep
Why this is the answer
A span is one named operation with a start time, end time, and span id. The full path across services is the trace, which is made of many spans. A key/value tag is a span attribute, not the span itself. A rule choosing which traces to record is sampling.
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