HTTP headers for distributed tracing (observability) - Part 4: HTTP headers listings in the web

This series of posts investigates the HTTP headers used to support tracing, which is one of the pillars of observability (also composed of logs and metrics). Although we focus on investigating these headers, these posts also serve as an introduction to distributed tracing and as a presentation of some technological alternatives for its implementation.

In particular, the question is: could we produce an in-house solution for distributed tracing with HTTP headers compatible with market solutions? Such an approach could bring portability and interoperability gains.

In this final post of the series, we examine some listings of known HTTP headers and try to reached a verdict about our question.

The complete post is available only in Portuguese.

Post digest

Searching for lists of HTTP headers, we found some headers somehow related to distributed tracing:

• http.dev: X-Request-ID.
• Wikipedia: X-Request-ID, but deprecated in favor of traceparent.
• Mozilla MDN Web Docs: nothing related found.

Based on this study, it could be a good option to rename our headers as the following:

• X-Request-ID becomes Trace-ID.
• CLIENT_APPLICATION_NAME becomes Client-Application-Name.
• CLIENT_CHAIN becomes Client-Chain.