How does Rails handle distributed tracing in large microservice ecosystems?

Rails integrates distributed tracing via OpenTelemetry and correlation IDs to track requests across services.

In microservice architectures, a single user request may traverse multiple services. Rails supports distributed tracing by propagating a trace_id through headers across HTTP calls and background jobs. Tools like OpenTelemetry, Datadog APM, and New Relic collect spans representing each service interaction. This enables root-cause analysis of latency, failure points, and dependency bottlenecks.