Honestly, you're probably better off looking at https://opentracing.io/. For a bit of context, I started working on my thesis in 2009 when there weren't many commercial tools available for doing this kind of tracing; by time I was done, there were a ton of open source and commercial tools available.

Thesis is here: https://harvest.usask.ca/handle/10388/ETD-2015-06-2185