At which layer would distributed tracing be implemented in a cloud native deployment?

While networking transports trace data, tracing itself tracks the request's journey through application logic, not solely network hops.

Distributed tracing involves instrumenting application code to generate and propagate trace context, allowing the monitoring system to reconstruct the end-to-end flow of a request across multiple services by adding spans and context propagation within the application itself.

While databases are components in a distributed system, distributed tracing focuses on the application's interaction with the database and other services, not just the database layer.

Infrastructure monitoring focuses on resource utilization, but distributed tracing dives deeper into the application's internal request processing across services.