All developers know that moment when, after we’ve reviewed everything and completed our sanity tests, our code somehow doesn’t work in production. The question is, how quickly and easily can we discover the problem so that we can continue delivering features faster and more confidently to our users?

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is an open source selection of tools, SDKs and APIs, that allows developers to collect and export traces, metrics and logs. It’s the second-most active project in the CNCF, and is emerging as the industry standard for system observability and distributed tracing across cloud-native and distributed architectures. OTel supports multiple languages, like JavaScript, Java, Python, Go, Ruby and C++.

In our line of work, it’s not uncommon to encounter customers that have custom workflows or architectures that may not always support distributed tracing mechanisms. In development in general, we often have our beliefs on what should happen in theory and we rely on Hello-World examples, only to be surprised by what happens in reality. Our customers too sometimes have to build creative solutions to deal with unique situations – which then motivates us to build creative solutions as well.