Distributed tracing follows a request as it moves across services, so you can see the full path of a call instead of just one hop. In the Go agent, this is controlled by the ATATUS_TRACING environment variable:
Then read the variable into the tracer at startup:
Set ATATUS_TRACING to false if you want to disable distributed tracing while still collecting transactions and errors.
Make sure the request context is propagated to downstream calls, such as database queries and outgoing HTTP requests, so those spans stay linked to the correct trace. See Routes or handlers not showing up as transactions for an example.