Abstract: An approach for distributed tracing is provided. The approach for distributed tracing comprises receiving a user request for a transaction by one or more processing units, and extracting feature data from the received user request by one or more processing units. Further, if the extracted feature data matches at least one policy generated based on at least one error response received from at least one service is determined by one or more processing units and the at least one service is instructed to collect tracing data for the transaction in a head-based fashion responsive to the extracted feature data matching at least one policy by one or more processing units.

Abstract: Embodiments of the present disclosure relate to policy-based request tracing in a distributed environment. In an embodiment, a computer-implemented method is disclosed. According to the method, a first set of requests and a second set of requests are determined in a plurality of received requests based on a policy. A first subset of requests is selected from the first set of requests based on a first sampling rate, and a second subset of requests is selected from the second set of requests based on a second sampling rate that is less than the first sampling rate. Executions of the first subset of requests and the second subset of requests on components of a distributed system are then traced. In other embodiments, a system and a computer program product are disclosed.