← Back to glossary
Glossary

Trace Context

Reviewed 9 April 2026 Canonical definition

Trace context is the metadata — typically a trace ID and span ID — that is propagated alongside a request as it moves through an agent system, enabling all the operations triggered by that request to be linked into a single distributed trace. Consistent trace context propagation is a prerequisite for distributed tracing and is standardised by the W3C Trace Context specification.