OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a vendor-neutral observability framework for generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry data. It defines three signals:

• Traces -- Follow a request across services. Made up of spans (units of work with timing, status, and relationships).
• Metrics -- Numeric measurements aggregated over time: counters, histograms, gauges.
• Logs -- Structured event records, correlated with traces via trace/span IDs.

All three signals share a common context propagation mechanism so they can be correlated.

Node.js Setup

Auto-Instrumentation

npm install @opentelemetry/sdk-node @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node \
  @opentelemetry/exporter-trace-otlp-grpc @opentelemetry/exporter-metrics-otlp-grpc