An insurance claims flow passes through an API gateway, a quoting service and a payments service, and each emits its own telemetry. Support wants a single timeline showing every hop for one customer request. What capability supplies that?
Show answer and explanation
Answer: B
Distributed tracing in Application Insights propagates a correlation context, including an operation identifier, through HTTP headers as one request moves between services. The telemetry from each hop carries the same identifier, so the transaction view and application map can assemble an end-to-end timeline. Host logs with timestamps are hard to join reliably, separate resources without a shared identifier cannot be linked, and counters show aggregate resource use rather than the path of one request.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Timestamp-only logs on separate hosts cannot be reliably tied to one customer request across services. Without a shared identifier, support would be guessing which lines belong to the same transaction.
- C. Isolating each service in its own resource without correlation keeps telemetry siloed. The services never exchange an identifier, so no single timeline can link their hops together.
- D. Counters for CPU and memory describe resource consumption per machine. They say nothing about the path of an individual request through the services.