Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Distributed transaction tracing (DTT) is a way of following the progress of message requests as they permeate through distributed cloud environments. Tracing the transactions as they make their way through many different layers of the application stack, such as from Kafka to ActiveMQ to MQ or any similar platform, is achieved by tagging the message request with a unique identifier that allows it to be followed.

In the previous article I covered how to set up auto-instrumented tracing for a Node.js app using OpenTelemetry (OTEL). We then sent the spans directly to the open source tracing tool Jaeger. I recommend you give that a read first before walking through this guide because we're going to re-use the instrumentation we set up last time. Today we're going to take things a step further by introducing the OpenTelemetry Collector.

AWS’s serverless technologies are popular because they provide cost effective scaling and great separation of concerns. However, observing serverless architectures like Lambda is challenging due to their transient nature and abstracted infrastructure. Unlike traditional systems with consistent hosts, serverless functions are ephemeral, often scaling rapidly and operating in isolation.

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is an open-source, vendor-neutral observability solution that provides a suite of components—including APIs, SDKs, and a data collector—that enable teams to collect and communicate telemetry data from cloud-native applications and services. OTel also defines the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP), a standard for the encoding and transfer of telemetry data.