Practical introduction to OpenTelemetry tracing

OpenTelemetry is a standard for tracing across multiple components. Let’s see how to set it up.

Tracking a request’s flow across different components in distributed systems is essential. With the rise of microservices, their importance has risen to critical levels. Some proprietary tools for tracking have been used already: Jaeger and Zipkin naturally come to mind.

Observability is built on three pillars: logging, metrics, and tracing. OpenTelemetry is a joint effort to bring an open standard to them. Jaeger and Zipkin joined the effort so that they are now OpenTelemetry compatible.

In this talk, I’ll describe the above in more detail and showcase a (simple) use case to demo how you could benefit from OpenTelemetry in your distributed architecture.