Introducing distributed tracing with Micrometer Tracing and Zipkin

To recapitulate Chapter 8, Introduction to Spring Cloud, in reference to the Using Micrometer Tracing and Zipkin for distributed tracing section, the tracing information from a complete workflow is called a trace or a trace tree, and sub-parts of the tree, for example, the basic units of work, are called spans. Spans can consist of sub-spans forming the trace tree. Metadata can be added to a trace and its spans as key-value pairs called tags. The Zipkin UI can visualize a trace tree and its spans as follows:

Figure 14.1: Example of a trace with its spans

Micrometer Tracing is used to collect trace information, propagate trace contexts (for example, trace and span IDs) in calls to other microservices and export the trace information into trace analysis tools like Zipkin. The handling of the trace information is done under the hood, by a tracer. Micrometer supports auto-configuration of tracers based on...