In recent years the usage of event-sourcing systems like Kafka or SQS is growing rapidly among Node.js applications. Building systems around an event-driven architecture simplifies horizontal scalability in distributed computing models and makes them more resilient to failure. This is because applications state can be copied across multiple parallel snapshots for high availability. But with these advantages new challenges are arising - mainly to get visibility in these complex processes.

Since event-driven architecture is asynchronous by nature, it's hard to keep track of what happened when and what are the relations between the different components in the system. This can be extremely important when trying to debug transactions or figuring out bottlenecks in the system.

In this talk, we will present ways to achieve end-to-end and granular visibility into complex event-sourcing transactions using distributed tracing. We will use open-source tools like OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, and Zipkin to showcase a complex Node.js system using SQS and Kafka.