OpenTelemetry (OTel) is an open-source observability framework that provides a standardized way of collecting, processing, and exporting telemetry data (metrics, traces, and logs) from distributed systems. It was born by a merger between two previously separate observability projects, OpenCensus and OpenTracing, and it is currently maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Distributed Tracing, combined with end-to-end monitoring, lets organizations keep track of their business transactions and receive alerts when anomalies happen. End-to-end monitoring benefits business users and functional administrators more than developers and technical administrators. Nowadays, for developing integration solutions, microservice architectures are becoming the norm. A solution based on such an architecture relies on different services that shape a specific solution together.

So you're used to debugging systems using a distributed trace, but your system is about to introduce a message queue—and that will work the same… right? Unfortunately, in a lot of implementations, this isn't the case. In this post, we'll talk about trace propagation (manual and OpenTelemetry), W3C tracing, and also where a trace might start and finish.

Distributed tracing enables you to monitor and observe requests as they flow through your distributed systems to understand whether these requests are behaving properly. You can compare tiny differences between multiple traces coming through your microservices-based applications every day to pinpoint areas that are affecting performance. As a result, debugging and troubleshooting are simpler and faster.

Monitoring and troubleshooting distributed systems like those built with microservices is challenging. Traditional monitoring tools struggle with distributed systems as they were made for a single component. Distributed tracing solves this problem by tracking a transaction across components. In this article, we will implement distributed tracing for a Java Spring Boot application with three microservices.

OpenTelemetry consists of several main components. But to understand the architecture, we will start by understanding some of the key design principles behind the design and architecture of OpenTelemetry. But before that, let us have a brief overview of OpenTelemetry.

Any application you build has three distinct layers - a server-side interface, a client-side interface and the central codebase. In a monolith application, all these programs are written in a single language, and placed in the same web stack as well. Earlier web applications were written this way.

As an open source company that grew out of a side project in 2008 to an application and performance monitoring platform (APM) used by over 3.5 million developers, Sentry is committed to open source and the community of developers maintaining and building in the open. Similarly, we take a public approach to building our software, which is why it’s a natural extension of our values to announce our support for OpenTelemetry (or OTel), the leading open standard for observability.