OpenTelemetry: Trace and instrument your application code

Originally, two open-source projects existed to allow you to implement tracing in your applications: OpenCensus and OpenTracing.

These two projects had the same goal and decided to merge to form OpenTelemetry. They are now incubated within the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation).

The objective remains the same: to allow developers to implement distributed tracing on their applications and to have an end-to-end view of what is happening from the user request on a web front-end to the various back-end services that are called.

This makes it much easier to identify problems in production as well as to debug to know the precise context of a request.

If you have not set up a stack from the start of your projects, you will have to go through your code again to set it up, but you can add it gradually: start by setting up traces in the critical parts of your code and then complete it later with logs and instrumentations on the various tools you use (databases, HTTP/gRPC APIs, cache, etc.).

How does OpenTelemetry work?