Do we really need tracing? At what scale do we need tracing? It’s expensive. We don’t need it.

Quite often you might be hearing such things when it comes to tracing. We tend to pair this pillar of observability with huge enterprises with hundreds of microservices. But what’s the actual effort to implement at least some level of tracing? And most importantly, what are the benefits we can get? We’ll show you how to start with tracing using OpenTelemetry framework at any scale and how it can dramatically improve the observability of your applications.

OpenTelemetry is an open source observability framework. It is a CNCF Sandbox member, formed through a merger of the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects. The goal of OpenTelemetry is to provide a general-purpose API, SDK, and related tools required for the instrumentation of cloud-native software, frameworks, and libraries.