> Its not a hard problem, [...]. At its core its structured events that carry two GUIDs along with them: a trace ID and a parent event ID. It is just building a tree.

I've always wondered, what's the point of the trace ID? What even is a trace?

- It could be a single database query that's invoked on a distributed database, giving you information about everything that went on inside the cluster processing that query.

- Or it could be all database calls made by a single page request on a web server.

- Or it could be a collection of page requests made by a single user as part of a shopping checkout process. Each page request could make many outgoing database calls.

Which of these three you should choose merely depends on what you want to visualize at a given point in time. My hope is that at some point we get a standard for tracing that does away with the notion of trace IDs. Just treat everything going on in the universe as a graph of inter-connected events.