If you're interested in distributed system tracing there's a lot going on. As a starting point, I would recommend reading Google's paper on their project "Dapper." [1] It's essentially the core of most distributed tracing systems. At least those I've encountered. There's a lot of tooling out there that take their cues from Dapper. I've recently been looking into integrating OpenZipkin[2] with our systems. I see at as…
I'm sure this is not new, but still useful to get the word out about the power of universal X-Request-Id: https://twitter.com/dhh/status/795732523640766464
In practice, the analysis a DAG allows you to perform are way more powerful. So if you're in the process of setting that request ID stuff up, consider doing the tracing way.