Distributed Tracing with OpenTelemetry: From Instrumentation to Visualization

A practical checklist for adding OpenTelemetry tracing to your services, shipping spans through the Collector, and turning that data into something you can actually debug with.

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ObservabilityIntermediate

opentelemetrydistributed-tracingobservabilityoteltracing

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Map your services and pick the first flows to trace

Critical

Deploy the OpenTelemetry Collector as your trace hub

Critical

Add auto-instrumentation to your applications

Critical

Propagate trace context across every service boundary

Critical

Pick a sampling strategy before your bill explodes

Critical

Use semantic conventions for span attributes

Never put secrets, tokens, or PII in span attributes

Critical

Correlate traces with logs and metrics

Stand up a tracing backend and visualize your first traces

Use traces to find latency hot spots, not just admire them

Monitor the Collector itself

Write a one-page tracing runbook for your team

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