Distributed Tracing for Elixir Systems

Discord has implemented distributed tracing for its Elixir systems to provide deeper insights into the performance and reliability of its services. This initiative allows engineers to trace operations across different parts of the system, helping to diagnose performance bottlenecks and outages more effectively. The implementation involved building custom solutions to propagate tracing context within Elixir's communication mechanisms, enabling end-to-end visibility without impacting system availability. The system now provides detailed end-to-end user experience insights beyond metrics and logs.