What is correlation-tracing?

A guide to distributed tracing, which follows one request across multiple services using shared IDs and tracked steps.

Use it to track request flows, connect errors across services, inspect service dependencies, and investigate latency.

It makes it easier to find where a request failed or became slow in a microservices system.

correlation-tracing — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by aj-geddes

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts --skill correlation-tracing

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/correlation-tracing/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/correlation-tracing)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/correlation-tracing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/correlation-tracing/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/correlation-tracing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/correlation-tracing.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 37 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 576 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits

Socket pass 18 Mar 2026
Snyk pass 4 Mar 2026

How audits are shown

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00037	$0.00576
Opus 5.5	$0.00015	$0.00230
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00007	$0.00115
Haiku 4.5	$0.00004	$0.00058

Measured 2mo ago against content hash f9f3327455eb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

correlation-tracing scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2mo ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/health-check.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/correlation-tracing/SKILL.md · 98 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 98 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Overview

Implement correlation IDs and distributed tracing to track requests across multiple services and understand system behavior.

When to Use

Microservices architectures
Debugging distributed systems
Performance monitoring
Request flow visualization
Error tracking across services
Dependency analysis
Latency optimization

Quick Start

Minimal working example:

import express from "express";
import { v4 as uuidv4 } from "uuid";

// Async local storage for context
import { AsyncLocalStorage } from "async_hooks";

const traceContext = new AsyncLocalStorage<Map<string, any>>();

interface TraceContext {
  traceId: string;
  spanId: string;
  parentSpanId?: string;
  serviceName: string;
}

function correlationMiddleware(serviceName: string) {
  return (
    req: express.Request,
    res: express.Response,
    next: express.NextFunction,
  ) => {
    // Extract or generate trace ID
    const traceId = (req.headers["x-trace-id"] as string) || uuidv4();
    const parentSpanId = req.headers["x-span-id"] as string;
    const spanId = uuidv4();
// ... (see reference guides for full implementation)

Reference Guides

Detailed implementations in the references/ directory:

Guide	Contents
Correlation ID Middleware (Express)	Correlation ID Middleware (Express)
OpenTelemetry Integration	OpenTelemetry Integration
Python Distributed Tracing	Python Distributed Tracing
Manual Trace Propagation	Manual Trace Propagation

Best Practices

✅ DO

Generate trace IDs at entry points
Propagate trace context across services
Include correlation IDs in logs
Use structured logging
Set appropriate span attributes
Sample traces in high-traffic systems
Monitor trace collection overhead
Implement context propagation

Read the full file on GitHub · 98 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

2mo ago First seen · 98 lines · 37 tokens per session scan A f9f3327455eb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

correlation-tracing is a skill published in the GitHub repository aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts (376 stars, last pushed 8mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 37 tokens to every session and 576 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

Debugging

correlation-tracing next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
correlation-tracingaj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts	Skill	376	8mo ago	MIT	A	37	Claude Code, Codex
systematic-debuggingopen-metadata/OpenMetadata	Skill	16k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	37	Claude Code
log-error-digestzebbern/claude-code-guide	Skill	4.7k	3d ago	MIT	A	71	Claude Code, Codex
cwv-optimizeradobe/skills	Skill	319	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	112	Claude Code
ci-fixersipyourdrink-ltd/bernstein	Skill	1.2k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	15	Claude Code, Codex
incident-response-incident-responsermyndharis/antigravity-skills	Skill	1.9k	23d ago	MIT	A	36	Claude Code
triaging-web-analytics-supportPostHog/posthog	Skill	41k	yesterday	none	A	151	Claude Code, Codex

correlation-tracing