Tracing Silent Bottlenecks with OpenTelemetry

Conventional logs show what went wrong at a fixed point, but not how long each step of a request took as it moved through the ecosystem.

How a Trace Works

A Trace is made up of a tree of Spans, where each span represents a unit of work with a marked start and end:

What to Watch For When Instrumenting

• Context Propagation: Make sure the tracing header is passed along through every internal call.
• Overhead: Instrument critical I/O calls without creating microscopic spans for purely in-memory operations.