OpenTelemetry standardizes distributed tracing across languages and vendors. Traces follow requests through service boundaries. Spans capture operation timing and context. Export to various backends.
Implementation
Instrument applications with OpenTelemetry SDKs. Auto-instrumentation captures common frameworks. Manual spans add custom context. Propagators pass trace context between services.
- Use auto-instrumentation for common frameworks
- Add manual spans for business-critical operations
- Configure exporters for your observability backend
- Set appropriate sampling rates for production
- Add custom attributes for debugging context
Analysis and Debugging
Trace visualization shows request flow. Identify slow services and bottlenecks. Debug errors with full request context. Correlate traces with logs and metrics.