Recording Program's Execution

Tracing refers to the particular use of logging to record information about a program’s execution, used for troubleshooting or diagnostic purposes.

Achieving tracing

We can achieve tracing in its simplest form by associating every request to the program with a unique identifier and recording logs for the most important operations of the program alongside the request identifier.

In this way, when we try to diagnose a specific customer issue, the logs can easily be filtered down to only include a chronologically ordered list of operation logs of the associated request identifier. These logs can provide a summary of the various operations the program executed and the steps it went through.