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If you're thinking something and you can think it in a generic English sentence, you can write that query and execute it with trace operators. That's basically it.

Debugging errors in distributed systems can be a challenging task, as it involves tracing the flow of operations across numerous microservices. This complexity often leads to difficulties in pinpointing the root cause of performance issues or errors. OpenTelemetry provides instrumentation libraries in most programming languages for tracing.

The OpenTelemetry Astronomy Shop is a widely used demonstration environment designed to illustrate the concepts and practical implementation of observability in distributed systems. Built as a microservice-based e-commerce application, the demo provides developers with a near real-world environment where they can explore how telemetry data—metrics, logs, and traces—can be collected, processed, and visualized.

I tried thinking back to when the last time I read an actual tutorial that did not include a bunch of em (—) dashes, semicolons, normal dashes, and an unnervingly large quantity of the phrases like “XYZ-thing Alert ” and “Exciting News!”. Well, hold on to your suspenders folks, here we go again. Part 2 is up and it’s a controversial one.

APM tracing records the complete execution path of a request as it travels through your system, including database queries, external API calls, cache lookups, message queue events, and inter-service requests. Each step is captured with precise start and end timestamps, duration, and context such as service name, operation name, and relevant attributes. This lets you pinpoint where latency or errors originate without piecing together metrics and logs manually.

The OpenTelemetry Gateway (OTel Gateway) is a centralized service that collects, processes, and routes telemetry data—metrics, traces, and logs—across your infrastructure. In a typical setup, each service pushes telemetry directly to an observability backend. While this approach works well for small environments, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage as systems grow.