The term Request Trace (or Request Tracing) primarily refers to a diagnostic technique in software development and system administration used to track the end-to-end lifecycle of an HTTP or application request. Because it is a general concept, it takes a few distinct forms depending on the specific context or software you are using: 1. HTTP Request Tracing (Microsoft IIS)
In the context of Windows Server, Failed Request Tracing (FRT) is a highly popular built-in feature of Internet Information Services (IIS).
Purpose: It targets and isolates specific bugs (like HTTP 500 or 401 errors) or performance bottlenecks (like requests taking longer than 3 seconds) without dragging down the performance of the entire web server.
How it works: You configure a Trace Rule (e.g., watch for 404 status codes). The server buffers the data in memory and flushes it to an XML log file only if the request fails according to your rule.
What it logs: It provides a highly detailed breakdown of the IIS pipeline, including which authentication modules ran, what handler was chosen, and exactly how many milliseconds each step took. 2. Distributed Tracing (Microservices)
In modern cloud architectures, request tracing is more commonly known as Distributed Tracing.
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