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Logging tells you **What** happened. Tracing tells you **Where** the time was spent. If a request takes 5 seconds, was it slow because of the Database, a slow Network call to the Identity service, or a locked thread in the API? OpenTelemetry provides the answer.
Jaeger provides a Gantt-chart view of your request. You can see exactly how long each internal call took. If a SELECT query took 4.5 seconds of a 5-second request, you know exactly where to optimize without looking at a single line of log text.
Q: "What is the performance overhead of enabling tracing on every single request?"
Architect Answer: "Tracing can add significant overhead because it generates a lot of telemetry data. For high-traffic systems, we use **Sampling**. Instead of tracing 100% of requests, we might only trace 1% (or only trace requests that take longer than 500ms). This gives us enough data to identify trends and bottlenecks without slowing down the production cluster."
Quizzes linked to this course—pass to earn certificates.
On this page
1. Spans and Traces 2. Visualizing with Jaeger 4. Interview Mastery