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Community & Business Groups

Distributed Trace Context Community Group

This group has completed its work. People interested in this topic should join the Distributed Tracing Working Group.

The mission of this group was to define the standard for distributed trace context propagation. Distributed trace context is used to enable monitoring and diagnostics scenarios in micro-services environment. It consists of request identifiers and key properties that needs to be propagated from one micro-service to another. These identifiers and properties are used to analyze an end-to-end distributed traces.

The group primary objective was to publish a specification for the protocols to use for distributed trace context propagation. Protocol includes wire format and recommended scenarios to use these protocols in applications, web servers, libraries, and platforms. The group also targetted to produce reference implementation for some languages.

Standardized and universally used trace context propagation protocols enable monitoring and diagnostics scenarios that are hard to achieve otherwise. Authors of libraries, web servers, and application performance management (APM) vendors interested to improve micro-services monitoring and diagnostics story were encouraged to participate in this group.

Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time

Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.

Drafts / licensing info

Date Name
trace context

First Draft of trace context published by Distributed Trace Context Community Group

On 2018-04-13 the Distributed Trace Context Community Group published the first draft of the following specification:

Participants contribute material to this specification under the W3C Community Contributor License Agreement (CLA).

If you have any questions, please contact the group on their public list: public-trace-context@w3.org. Learn more about the Distributed Trace Context Community Group.