Unify traces, metrics, and logs with OpenTelemetry. Instrumentation, sampling, and backend-agnostic pipelines.

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Observability with OpenTelemetry: Traces, Metrics, and Logs

OpenTelemetry gives you a single, vendor-neutral way to emit traces, metrics, and logs. Here’s how to adopt it.

Why OpenTelemetry #

Vendor-neutral: Switch backends (Jaeger, Prometheus, Datadog, etc.) without changing app code.
Single SDK: One instrumentation story for many languages.
Correlation: Link trace IDs to logs and metrics for faster debugging.

Quick Instrumentation (Node.js)#

javascript.javascript

const { NodeSDK } = require('@opentelemetry/sdk-node');
const { getNodeAutoInstrumentations } = require('@opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node');

const sdk = new NodeSDK({
  traceExporter: myExporter,
  metricReader: myMetricReader,
  instrumentations: [getNodeAutoInstrumentations()],
});
sdk.start();

Best Practices #

Sample in production (e.g. 10% of traces) to control cost and volume.
Set resource attributes (service.name, deployment.environment) for filtering.
Use semantic conventions so dashboards and alerts stay consistent.
Secure exporters (TLS, auth) and avoid PII in spans.

Start with one service and one backend; then roll out and add more signals.

Observability with OpenTelemetry: Traces, Metrics, and Logs

Observability with OpenTelemetry: Traces, Metrics, and Logs

Why OpenTelemetry #

Quick Instrumentation (Node.js)#

Best Practices #

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About Kiril urbonas

Observability with OpenTelemetry: Traces, Metrics, and Logs

Why OpenTelemetry#

Quick Instrumentation (Node.js)#

Best Practices#

Stay Updated

Systemd Tricks We Use to Keep Services Boring

How We Stopped Terraform Drift from Surprising On-Call

More from DevOps

Incident Postmortems That Actually Prevent Repeat Failures

How We Cut Our Docker Image Size by 80% and Why It Matters

Artifact Promotion Instead of Rebuilds: The Release Control Pattern That Stopped Drift

About Kiril urbonas

Why OpenTelemetry #

Best Practices #