If a DevOps team has observability of system behavior but lacks tracking across microservices, what should they adopt?

The adoption of tracing is essential for a DevOps team that has observability of system behavior but lacks tracking across microservices. Tracing provides the capability to follow the path of a request as it traverses through various microservices, allowing teams to visualize and understand the interactions and dependencies between them. It helps pinpoint performance bottlenecks, errors, and the timing of different services, offering a clear picture of the system's behavior across the microservices landscape.

By implementing tracing, the team can gather detailed telemetry data regarding the execution flow and the relationships among services. This is crucial for identifying how different components of the system contribute to overall performance and can lead to improved troubleshooting and enhanced user experiences.

In contrast, logging generally captures discrete events or messages from applications, which might provide insights but does not inherently show the connections between microservices. Monitoring dashboards are primarily focused on visualizing performance metrics but do not provide the in-depth, service-by-service tracking that tracing offers. Load balancing, while important for distributing traffic, does not affect the teams' ability to track how requests flow through microservices. Thus, tracing is the most effective solution for gaining visibility into system behavior across microservices.