Chapter

Context Propagation

Distributed tracing breaks silently when proxies and message buses drop W3C trace context. This workshop contains a sample e-commerce application with some of the common context & correlation breaks

90 minutes Author Diana Omuoyo

Overview

In this workshop, you’ll deploy the Cosmic Observatory Shop - an astronomy equipment storefront - and instrument it with Splunk RUM and Splunk APM.

You will observe fragmented service map and traces when required W3C headers are stripped at these three layers.

  1. Edge NGINX gateway - drops W3C trace headers (frontend-api → order API)
  2. Payment gateway proxy - instrumented Node.js proxy drops headers (frontend-api → payment API)
  3. RabbitMQ message bus - async payment → fulfillment with no trace context in AMQP headers

We will then fix the issues to restore end-to-end context propagation across all service and infrastructure layers.

Architecture | Expected Output

The goal is to reolve propagation issues across the three layers and go from a broken state

servicemap1

to a fully integrated and correlated view - PlaceHolder Image Below

servicemap2