Distributed tracing using traceparent

Similar to tracking transactions using the tracking token, for transactions that are called through CICS® Transaction Gateway, CICS TG provides a mechanism by which monitoring products, also referred to as stakeholders, can trace requests in a processing system of record using traceparent. The traceparent format is defined as per the W3C recommendation.

With this mechanism, CICS TG clients pass the traceparent to CICS TG from where observability tools such as Instana leverage the traceparent to track transactions end-to-end. This type of tracing enables accurate tracking of transactions/requests as they traverse through the different components of the processing system.

This illustration shows three CICS Transaction Gateway clients, each using a different application to set traceparent, namely Application Server, Java application, and .NET/.NETCore. Each of these clients sends an ECI request with traceparent to CICS TG, where requestExit is used to fetch the traceparent that was set on the client side. The traceparent is then consumed by the stakeholder's agent. Finally, the request reaches the designated CICS TS region over an IPIC/IPIC SSL connectivity. On CICS TS, the traceparent is available in the ODADPTRDATA1 field.