At a recent start-up like situation we paid licensing for a monitoring and metrics provider that provided out of the box tracing infrastructure for us.

It turned out that the licensing was quite expensive for what we where getting (couldn't even get outlier traces), we didn't have much control of our infrastructure (couldn't control the sampling rate in such a way to keep all the traces we needed), and ultimately the learning curve for making the infrastructure scalable was a challenge as well.

Even after setting up tracing in our entire system successfully, I ultimately found it of minimal value and we ended up relying on ELK and log aggregation for more insight.

Tbh, it was a disappointing experience and just reading how much custom dev was required in this post to make tracing work for you guys makes me disappointed. Given the frame of work I do (consulting), I doubt tracing will ever prove more valuable than spending money on log aggregation and other monitoring efforts and tools.