---
title: "Propagation"
source: OpenTelemetry Documentation
source_url: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry.io
licence: CC-BY-4.0
domain: engineering
subdomain: opentelemetry-docs
date_added: 2026-04-25
---

---
---

With context propagation, [Signals](/docs/concepts/signals/) can be correlated
with each other, regardless of where they are generated. Although not limited to
tracing, context propagation allows [traces](/docs/concepts/signals/traces/) to
build causal information about a system across services that are arbitrarily
distributed across process and network boundaries.

For the vast majority of use cases, libraries that natively support
OpenTelemetry or [instrumentation libraries](../libraries/) will automatically
propagate trace context across services for you. It is only in rare cases that
you will need to propagate context manually.

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To learn more, see [Context propagation](/docs/concepts/context-propagation).

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To understand context propagation, you need to understand two separate concepts:
context and propagation.

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