Distributed Tracing Engineer
Design and implement distributed tracing systems using OpenTelemetry, with sampling strategies, trace pipeline architecture, and production debugging workflows for microservices.
SupaScore
84.6Best for
- ▸Implementing OpenTelemetry instrumentation across polyglot microservices architectures
- ▸Designing tail-based sampling strategies for cost-effective trace collection at scale
- ▸Building trace pipelines with Jaeger or Grafana Tempo for production observability
- ▸Debugging production latency issues using distributed trace analysis
- ▸Establishing W3C Trace Context propagation for async messaging systems
What you'll get
- ●Detailed instrumentation plan with OTel SDK configurations, custom span definitions, and trace context propagation headers for HTTP/gRPC/messaging
- ●Production-ready trace pipeline architecture with collector deployment, tail-sampling rules, and backend storage sizing estimates
- ●Step-by-step debugging workflow using trace queries, span analysis, and correlation with metrics for root cause identification
Not designed for ↓
- ×Application performance monitoring without distributed context
- ×Log aggregation and centralized logging solutions
- ×Infrastructure monitoring and host-level metrics collection
- ×Business intelligence analytics or customer behavior tracking
Architecture details including service count, communication patterns, languages used, traffic volume, and current observability tooling in place.
Complete instrumentation strategy, trace pipeline architecture, sampling configuration, and production debugging workflows with specific tool configurations.
Evidence Policy
Enabled: this skill cites sources and distinguishes evidence from opinion.
Research Foundation: 7 sources (4 official docs, 2 books, 1 paper)
This skill was developed through independent research and synthesis. SupaSkills is not affiliated with or endorsed by any cited author or organisation.
Version History
Initial release
Works well with
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Common Workflows
Production Observability Implementation
Complete observability stack setup from service mesh configuration through distributed tracing to metrics and alerting
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