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Clarify context in tracing page (#2891)

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Phillip Carter 2023-06-20 07:16:22 -07:00 committed by GitHub
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content/en/docs/concepts/signals/traces.md
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@ -143,19 +143,22 @@ A **Context** is an object that contains the information for the sending and
receiving service to correlate one span with another and associate it with the
trace overall. For example, if Service A calls Service B, then a span from
Service A whose ID is in context will be used as the parent span for the next
span created in Service B.
span created in Service B. The trace ID that is in context will be used for the
next span created in Service B as well, which signifies that the span is part of
the same trace as the span from Service A.
**Propagation** is the mechanism that moves Context between services and
processes. By doing so, it assembles a Distributed Trace. It serializes or
deserializes Span Context and provides the relevant Trace information to be
propagated from one service to another. We now have what we call: **Trace
Context**.
**Propagation** is the mechanism that moves context between services and
processes. It serializes or deserializes the context object and provides the
relevant Trace information to be propagated from one service to another.
Propagation is usually handled by instrumentation libraries and is transparent
to the user, but in the event that you need to manually propagate context, you
can use Propagation APIs.
Context is an abstract concept - it requires a concrete implementation to
actually be useful. OpenTelemetry supports several different Context formats.
The default format used in OpenTelemetry tracing is W3C `TraceContext`. Each
Context object is associated with a span and can be accessed specification on
spans. See [Span Context](#span-context).
OpenTelemetry supports several different context formats. The default format
used in OpenTelemetry tracing is called
[W3C TraceContext](https://www.w3.org/TR/trace-context/). Each context object is
stored in a span. See [Span Context](#span-context) for details on the context
object and what other information is available..
By combining Context and Propagation, you now can assemble a Trace.