OpenTelemetry Tutorial — Practical Tracing, Sampling, and Cost-Control for Microservices
Surprising fact: unchecked traces can be one of the fastest-growing items on your observability bill — teams report cutting trace ingestion by 70–90% with sensible sampling and pipeline tuning while retaining 90%+ of the actionable signal. This guide gives pragmatic, multi-language steps to instrument backend microservices, choose sampling strategies, and control cost in production. Why OpenTelemetry matters for microservices Microservices multiply the surface area for failures. Distributed tracing solves the “which service failed?” problem by connecting spans across processes. OpenTelemetry (OTel) is the de-facto standard SDK + collector ecosystem that unifies metrics, traces, and logs. Adopt it to get consistent context propagation, vendor portability, and a single place to apply sampling and redaction rules. Common pitfalls: instrumenting everything with 100% fidelity (exploding costs), inconsistent naming across languages, and missing context propagation in async flows. ...