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 #

Best Practices: Terraform State Isolation by Environment

Best Practices: Ansible Role Design for Large Teams

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About Kiril urbonas

Observability with OpenTelemetry: Traces, Metrics, and Logs

Why OpenTelemetry#

Quick Instrumentation (Node.js)#

Best Practices#

Best Practices: Terraform State Isolation by Environment

Best Practices: Ansible Role Design for Large Teams

More from DevOps

End-of-Week Engineering: Why Smart Tech Teams Don’t Ship Major Changes on Friday

SRE Error Budgets in Practice: Shipping Fast Without Burning Reliability

GitHub Actions for Monorepos: Fast CI Without Pipeline Chaos

About Kiril urbonas

Why OpenTelemetry #

Best Practices #