Correlation Identifier: Ensuring Traceability in Distributed Systems

Correlation identifier of requests-responses is an essential feature of microservice platforms for monitoring, reporting, debugging and diagnostics.
Allows tracing a single request inside the application flow, when it can often be dealt with by multiple downstream services.

Problem statement

The most trending direction in software development is distributing processing and systems. In software architectual system designs there are multiple service layouts: single monolithic systems, SOA distribution, and nowadays microservice level grouping of services, applications.
In case of multiple services, we should consider, even multiple running entities from one specific service.

In case of looking into the logs, we could have a harder time to track down the chain of calls and locate the specific instances, which was hit by the request, through serving a user request.

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