X-Trace is a network diagnostic tool designed to provide users and network operators with better visibility into increasingly complex Internet applications. It does this by annotating network requests with metadata that can be used to reconstruct requests, even those that make use of multiple network layers. X-Trace “enabled” Internet sites make use of these identifiers to record the path that requests take through their network.

Although X-Trace is still under development, some preliminary information and code is available here for testing and evaluation purposes.

• Current Version - 2.0 http://sourceforge.net/projects/xtraceprj/
• Legacy Version - 1.3 https://gforge.x-trace.net/gf/project/xtrace/

Check out the ongoing efforts work to get X-Trace or some similar path based tracing into Hadoop by looking at this Apache JIRA proposal

• Coral CDN new!
• Hadoop
• Oasis Anycast Service
• Thrift

• Java API reference (javadoc) new! version 2.0
• C++ API Reference new! version 2.0
• X-Trace Metadata Specification [txt]
• Tutorial 1 - X-Trace Getting Started new!
• X-Trace backend server configuration guide
• Specifications for report keys and values

• Using X-Trace in your code
• Filtering reports with severity

• Mailing list
• Feature requests, bug listing, "to-do" list
• Discussion

X-Trace: A Pervasive Network Tracing Framework (html) NSDI'07