Distributed tracing is a technique used to track the progress of a request as it travels through a distributed system. It allows you to see how different components of the system interact with each other, and can help you identify bottlenecks and other issues that may be affecting the performance of your application.

In Spring Boot, you can use the Spring Cloud Sleuth library to add distributed tracing to your application. Sleuth integrates with popular tracing systems such as Zipkin, Jaeger, and Elastic APM to collect and display trace data.

To use Sleuth in your Spring Boot application, you will need to:

Add the Spring Cloud Sleuth starter dependency to your project.

Configure your tracing system of choice (e.g. Zipkin, Jaeger, etc.).

Annotate your service beans with the @Trace annotation to enable tracing for individual methods.

Sleuth will automatically add trace information to your application logs, which can then be collected and displayed by your tracing system. You can also use the Sleuth API to manually add trace information to your application code.

https://spring.io/projects/spring-cloud-sleuth