How to Find Failures Without Drowning in Tracing Data

Traces provide a detailed view of a request’s journey through data, microservices and applications, helping SREs pinpoint where failures occur and resolve issues faster. But while tracing can reduce downtime and developer burnout, collecting every trace creates its own problems. Storing massive volumes of data is expensive, can burden the systems being monitored and makes it harder to find the information that actually matters.

On this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Sarah Hudspeth, Senior Solutions Architect of Cortex XCOR by Palo Alto Networks, explains how teams can build a more effective tracing strategy. She breaks down how thoughtful sampling and observability design can turn tracing from a data-hoarding problem into a practical tool for production troubleshooting.