OpenTelemetry Trace Builder

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a vendor-neutral observability framework for generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry data (traces, metrics, logs). It is the merger of OpenTracing and OpenCensus and is now the industry standard for instrumentation. Backends like Jaeger, Zipkin, Datadog, and Honeycomb all accept OTel data.

A span represents a single unit of work — a function call, HTTP request, or database query. Spans have a name, start/end timestamps, attributes (key-value metadata), events (timestamped logs within a span), and a status (ok/error). Spans are organized into traces via parent-child relationships through trace context propagated in headers.

Traces track a single request's journey through distributed services — useful for understanding latency and finding bottlenecks. Metrics are aggregated measurements over time (request rate, p99 latency, error rate) — useful for dashboards and alerting. Logs are discrete text records of events — useful for debugging specific errors.

OTLP (OpenTelemetry Protocol) is the native wire protocol for OpenTelemetry, supporting gRPC and HTTP/protobuf transport. It is the recommended way to export telemetry from your SDK to a collector or backend. Most backends (Datadog, New Relic, Grafana Tempo) now accept OTLP directly.

Auto-instrumentation (via @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node) instruments popular libraries (Express, HTTP, pg, Redis) with zero code changes — great for getting started. Manual instrumentation lets you add custom spans and attributes for business logic. Use both: auto for infrastructure, manual for domain-specific operations.