Modern distributed architectures make it challenging to track request flows across dozens of microservices.

In this talk, we explore the W3C Trace Context standard: what it is, how it works, and how it enables seamless distributed tracing across heterogeneous platforms, libraries, and cloud providers.

We will examine practical examples of propagation headers (traceparent, tracestate) and how OpenTelemetry leverages them to give full visibility into distributed systems.