OpenTelemetry Instrumentation

OTel is the right answer for new services: vendor-agnostic, three signals (traces/metrics/logs) unified, growing ecosystem. The trap is footguns — easy to ship cardinality bombs, easy to drop spans on shutdown, easy to instrument so heavily that the trace becomes noise.

When to use

• Greenfield service — instrument before you go to prod.
• Replacing a fragmented setup (Prometheus alone for metrics + Jaeger alone for traces + raw stdout for logs).
• Standardizing across many services so one tool/dashboard works for all.

When NOT to use

• One existing service with deep Datadog/New Relic agent investment that already works — don't rip out unless cost forces it.
• Hyper-high-throughput data plane (>500k RPS per service) — sampling becomes the whole problem; use eBPF profiling alongside.

Three signals, one collector