As a starting point, I would recommend reading Google's paper on their project "Dapper." [1] It's essentially the core of most distributed tracing systems. At least those I've encountered.
There's a lot of tooling out there that take their cues from Dapper. I've recently been looking into integrating OpenZipkin[2] with our systems. I see at as a more viable alternative (no tie in!) to Yet Another Propriety Thing in AWS (YAPTA). There's other as well, like AppDash.
Recently there has been a push towards an open-standard for the collection side called OpenTracing[3]. I came across it when investigating LightStep[4]. Ideally that means no vendor lock-in, which of course has lots of knock-on effects.
If you know of any, I'd love to be pointed in the direction of _different_ and not just divergent techniques.
[1]: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...
[2]: http://zipkin.io
[4]: http://lightstep.com - Impressive team behind this.