Cross-boundary work preserves correlation and dependency attribution

ops-018

Intent

Make cross-process failures and slowdowns traceable to the specific dependency hop that caused them.

Applicability

Applies when the diff adds or changes outbound HTTP, RPC, queue, or message-boundary work inside a production flow.

What to inspect

Request headers, message metadata, client wrappers, trace propagation, and spans or metrics around dependency calls.

Pass criteria

The changed boundary forwards correlation or trace context and emits attributable telemetry for the dependency hop or meaningful substep.

Fail criteria

The diff introduces cross-boundary work without context propagation or without a visible way to attribute latency or failures to the dependency hop.

Do not flag

Same-process helper calls or frameworks with clearly configured automatic propagation and dependency instrumentation.

Confidence guidance

HIGH when propagation or attribution is clearly present or absent. MEDIUM when shared wrappers may provide it. LOW when auto-instrumentation is not visible.

Remediation

Forward the current trace or correlation context and instrument the dependency boundary with attributable telemetry.

Pass example

traceparent: 00-4bf92f3577b34da6a3ce929d0e0e4736-00f067aa0ba902b7-01
x-request-id: 9f7c1d

Fail example

await fetch(url, { method: "POST", body });

Sources

  • Building Microservices — Sam Newman, 2021 book
  • Google SRE Workbook book
  • Observability Engineering — 2022 book