Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The latest News and Information on Distributed Tracing and related technologies.

How to Trace Microservices WITHOUT OpenTelemetry

Learn how to trace complex multi-hop transactions across microservices when OpenTelemetry isn't available or trace parents get lost. This quick tutorial demonstrates how to use full-text search in proxymock (a free CLI and UI tool) to isolate user journeys (like looking up a specific username) and instantly generate waterfall tracing views. Whether you are working locally or in a Kubernetes cluster, you can record API traffic, visualize multi-hop requests, and easily transition those captures into load or regression tests.

Trace without traces

A customer emailed on a Tuesday: checkout hung for ten seconds. I opened our tracing tool, punched in the time window, and got nothing. The trace was sampled out. We keep 1% of traces, like most shops with real traffic do. The one request that actually mattered was in the 99% we threw away. I spent twenty minutes admiring our observability stack before admitting it couldn’t answer a first-grader’s question: what happened to this person? Here’s what I know now.

Next.js already traces your requests. Here's how to export them with OpenTelemetry.

Traces are a goldmine of information that can help you, or your AI, find slow pages and fix them. Next.js comes out of the box with support for tracing. Incoming requests, fetch() calls, middleware, and server-side rendering are all wired up and ready to send traces to any OpenTelemetry-compatible backend. The catch is, unless you configure an exporter, you’ll never see those traces.

How Grafana Cloud Ingests Your Data | Data Sources, Alloy & OTel Explained

Learn the two main ways to get data into Grafana Cloud. In this video, we break down how Grafana Cloud connects to over 150 external data sources (like Salesforce, Postgres, and CloudWatch) where your data stays in place, and how you can send raw telemetry into Grafana’s fully managed databases for logs, metrics, traces, and profiles.

The Data Plane Reality: OTel Scales, While Topology UX Lags

OpenTelemetry won the architectural standards battle. At scale, though, telemetry breaks more like plumbing than code. It breaks quietly, across a graph, with a blast radius you don’t understand until it’s expensive. With over 65% of organizations now running more than 10 collectors in production, hybrid deployments across Kubernetes and VMs are accelerating fast. Telemetry standardization is no longer a project milestone. It is a baseline expectation.

Telemetry Talks ep. 5 - OpenTelemetry in the AI agents era

Telemetry Talks explores how OpenTelemetry’s CNCF graduation arrives at a pivotal moment for AI-powered development. Together with Alex Marshalov, we dive into vibe coding, AI agents, and the growing need for observability in GenAI systems — from prompts and token usage to reasoning chains and distributed traces — using the VictoriaMetrics stack and OpenTelemetry as the foundation for understanding the next generation of autonomous software.

Use This OTel Processor to Prevent Your Dashboards From Breaking

A semantic-convention rename (http.method → http.request.method) can silently break your RED metrics — no errors, just gaps in dashboards and alerts. The OpenTelemetry Collector's schema processor fixes it: put it first in your pipeline and it normalizes attribute names no matter what each service emits. Migration mode writes BOTH the old and new names, so you get zero-downtime upgrades while queries keep working.