Traceability is the ability to follow a request, event, or item through a system and see where it went and what happened to it.
In software systems, this usually refers to distributed tracing: a request is assigned a trace ID, and each service records spans that show what happened during its work.
Traceability is useful for:
- Following a request across services
- Finding the slowest hop in a request path
- Seeing where an error was introduced
- Understanding dependencies between services
How it works
A trace usually starts at the edge of the system, such as an HTTP request, and gets propagated through downstream services.
Each service adds spans or events with timings and metadata so you can reconstruct the path later.
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Traceability is narrower than Observability.
- Traceability answers: where did this request go?
- Observability answers: what is the system doing overall?
Traceability is one signal within Observability, alongside Metrics and Logging.