OpenTelemetry

Overview Have you ever encountered this situation: users report “the system is slow,” you open Grafana and check a bunch of dashboards—CPU is fine, memory is fine, network is fine—but users insist it’s slow. What you need at this point is not more metric dashboards, but a complete request trace—from the moment the user clicks a button to when the database returns results, showing exactly how long each hop took and where it got stuck....

Overview In the era of cloud-native and microservices, a single request may traverse dozens of service nodes. Traditional monitoring scatters Metrics, Logs, and Traces across different systems — Prometheus for metrics, ELK for log search, Jaeger for tracing — with no unified way to correlate them. When an online incident occurs, you need to switch between three systems, manually piecing together correlated information, which is highly inefficient. OpenTelemetry (OTel) is the CNCF-led unified observability standard, aiming to use a single SDK/API to collect all three signals (Metrics, Logs, Traces), process them through a unified Collector, and send them to any backend....

Why Distributed Tracing In a microservices architecture, a single user request often traverses multiple services. When an endpoint’s latency spikes from 200ms to 2s, logs are scattered across N machines, making it difficult to pinpoint the bottleneck — is it slow gateway forwarding, a slow downstream DB query, or queuing in an inter-service call? Distributed tracing solves exactly this problem: it generates a globally unique Trace ID for each request, propagates it across services, and ultimately renders a complete call chain tree in the UI, making the duration of each segment visible at a glance....