Alibaba Cloud Certified Associate (ACA) 2025 – 400 Free Practice Questions to Pass the Exam

In the OpenTracing model, spans represent individual operations within a trace, and the relationships between these spans are crucial for understanding the flow of operations. The term "References" is specifically used to denote how spans relate to one another.

References allow spans to link to one another, indicating how they are connected in relation to the overall operation being traced. For instance, a span may reference another span to show that it is a child span, meaning it is a sub-operation of the parent span. This connection helps in creating a full picture of the request lifecycle across distributed systems, showing dependencies and the order in which operations occur.

Understanding the concept of References in the OpenTracing model is essential for accurately tracing requests through various services, making it a key aspect of distributed tracing. Other terms, like "Connection," "Connections," and "Branches," while they may seem related, do not specifically define the nature of the relationships among spans in the context of OpenTracing, hence making References the correct choice in this scenario.