Tag
distributed-tracing
- Jun 17, 2026 The traceparent Header: Field Widths and Version Negotiation The exact byte layout of the W3C traceparent header, why its fields are fixed width, what the flags byte means, and how a version-00 parser must treat unknown versions. observability
- Mar 24, 2026 Propagating Context Across Queues, Threads, and Proxies Why an implicit current-span variable fails the moment work moves to another thread or another process, and how context has to be carried explicitly through each boundary type. observability
- Mar 17, 2026 Clock Domains and the Ordering of Events Across Hosts Why timestamps from two machines cannot be subtracted to get a latency, what NTP slewing and stepping do to a span duration, and how causal order survives without a shared clock. observability
- Jul 23, 2025 Clock Skew and the Arithmetic of Span Durations Why span durations stay trustworthy while span start times do not, how skew makes a child appear to outlive its parent, and what correction can and cannot recover. observability
- Jan 7, 2025 Separating Injected Faults from Organic Failures in Telemetry How to mark injected traffic so it survives every hop, why filtering at query time beats deleting at ingestion, and how to keep an exercise out of the alert path without blinding it. devops
- Nov 22, 2021 Span Anatomy: Trace IDs, Span IDs, and Parent Links How a trace is assembled from spans, why two identifiers with different scopes are needed, and what a span record must carry for the tree to be reconstructible offline. observability