Distributed tracing is a method of tracking and analyzing a sequence of events across multiple services and components in a distributed system. It is commonly used in cloud-native applications to help diagnose and debug issues and performance bottlenecks in distributed systems. This is done by following the flow of a request across various services and components, and then collecting and analyzing performance metrics such as latency and throughput. Distributed tracing provides a detailed view of the internals of a distributed system and can be used to identify and isolate the root cause of performance issues.