Tracing Notifications

This post details the foundational work to implement end-to-end tracing for Slack notifications. It addresses the challenges of complex notification flows and the need for 100% fidelity by modeling each notification as its own trace, linked to the original message trace using span links. This approach simplifies instrumentation, reduces storage and query overhead, and enables consistent data formatting and sessionization across backend and client systems. The post also outlines the specific spans and tags used to capture the notification lifecycle from trigger to read.