# Tracing Discord's Elixir Systems (Without Melting Everything)

DevFeed: [Tracing Discord's Elixir Systems (Without Melting Everything)](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/tracing-discord-s-elixir-systems-without-melting-everything-287.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://discord.com/blog/tracing-discords-elixir-systems-without-melting-everything>)

Author: Nick Krichevsky

Published: 2026-03-04T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Discord Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/discord-blog.md>)

Topics: [tracing](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/tracing.md>), [Elixir](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/elixir.md>), [Discord](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/discord.md>), [Concurrency](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/concurrency.md>), [observability](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/observability.md>), [Instrumentation](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/instrumentation.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/systems.md>)

Tags: [concurrency](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/concurrency.md>), [concurrent](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/concurrent.md>), [discord](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/discord.md>), [elixir](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/elixir.md>), [instrumentation](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/instrumentation.md>), [logs](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/logs.md>), [metrics](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/metrics.md>), [monitoring](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/monitoring.md>), [observability](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/observability.md>), [on-call](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/on-call.md>), [outage](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/outage.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/systems.md>), [tracing](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/tracing.md>)

## AI overview

Discord describes how it added distributed tracing to its Elixir systems to investigate guild performance problems and outages at scale. The article explains the limitations of metrics, logs, and the internal guild timings tool, then outlines the work required to propagate tracing information through Elixir's message-passing system.

## Source excerpt

Join Senior Software Engineer Nick Krichevsky as he explains how Discord added distributed tracing to Elixir's message passing and optimized it to handle millions of concurrent users.