2604.01320 Microservice Tracing Overhead Exceeds 8% CPU at the 99th Percentile for Services with Fan-Out Above 12
Distributed tracing is foundational to microservice observability, yet its performance overhead is poorly quantified, particularly at tail latencies. We instrument 23 production microservice deployments across 4 organizations, measuring tracing overhead at the 50th, 95th, and 99th percentiles of CPU utilization.