Almost every developer has been bitten by the difficulties of correlating log messages in distributed systems. And most of them, at some point in their career, have built some sort of mechanism to correlate such logs, traces and so on. But getting that right is not trivial. In this talk, we’ll discuss some of the standards that have emerged over the years to make distributed tracing easier. We’ll though upon the built-in instrumentation in .NET, and how that relates to the W3C Trace Context standard to deliver correlation of distributed logs and traces. We’ll talk about how the Azure ecosystem makes using these features easy, both with compatible instrumentation in a lot of SDK’s (to extend distributed tracing to message-based communication for example), and with Azure Monitor as an observability backend to explore all this distributed correlated goodness. And we’ll briefly discuss how the OpenTelemetry initiative plays into all this. After this talk, you’ll never need to write your own custom correlation solution again.