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The latest News and Information on Distributed Tracing and related technologies.

Stop Logging the Request Body!

With more and more people adopting OpenTelemetry and specifically using the tracing signal, I’ve seen an uptick in people wanting to add the entire request and response body as an attribute. This isn’t ideal, as it wasn’t when people were logging the body as text logs. In this blog post, I’ll explain why this is a bad idea, what are the pitfalls, and more importantly, what you should do instead.

Grafana Beyla 2.0: distributed traces, scalable Kubernetes deployments, and more

In November 2023, we released Grafana Beyla 1.0, the first major milestone in our pursuit of zero-code (and zero-effort) eBPF instrumentation. We delivered a way — through a single command-line — to automatically instrument any application supporting HTTP/gRPC protocols, as well as provide basic network packet flow information.

Announcing Checkly Traces: Unified Synthetic Monitoring and Distributed Tracing

Until recently, Checkly was telling you what broke in your app. Now, it can also tell you why it broke. We're excited to announce the general availability of Checkly Traces, a new addition to our synthetic monitoring platform that bridges the gap between frontend monitoring and backend observability. By combining synthetic monitoring with distributed tracing, Checkly Traces empowers development teams to detect, diagnose, and resolve issues faster than ever before.

Getting Started with OpenTelemetry Java SDK

Understanding how your applications perform is crucial. OpenTelemetry has emerged as a powerful observability framework, offering a standardized approach to collecting telemetry data such as metrics, logs, and traces. For Java developers, the OpenTelemetry Java SDK provides the tools necessary to instrument applications effectively. This guide is all about the OpenTelemetry Java SDK, exploring its components, configuration, and advanced features to help you harness its full potential.

Find and Fix Performance Bottlenecks with Sentry's Trace Explorer

We’ve all worked on that app that hangs just a little too long in weird places, or had that query we could never get to perform just right. The network waterfall in Chrome DevTools can’t quite show us what’s going on behind the scenes, and tracing with OTel (and honestly, tracing in Sentry) was just… hard. Today that changes.

Streamlining Telemetry with Apica's Fleet Management Solution: A Deep Dive

In the rapidly evolving IT environment, observability at scale has become a critical challenge for organizations aiming to maintain operational excellence. The proliferation of telemetry collection agents across diverse infrastructures often increases complexity, resource strain, and configuration inconsistencies.

OpenTelemetry Processors: Workflows, Configuration Tips, and Best Practices

Most developers are familiar with Opentelemetry core components—Traces, Metrics, and Logs. But there’s one part of the OpenTelemetry ecosystem that doesn’t always get the spotlight: processors. These behind-the-scenes operators shape your data pipeline, helping you filter, enrich, and fine-tune telemetry data before it reaches your backend systems. Processors play a key role in making sure your data is cleaner, more useful, and just the way you need it.