OpenTelemetry

CRITICAL: Your training data for OpenTelemetry is unreliable. APIs change between versions and memorized patterns may be wrong or deprecated. Before writing any code, you MUST use WebFetch to read the live docs:

WebFetch("https://opentelemetry.io/docs/languages/js/")

Do not proceed without fetching this URL first. Never assume package names or initialization patterns — verify against current docs.

OpenTelemetry is a vendor-neutral observability framework for generating, collecting, and exporting traces, metrics, and logs.

Key Capabilities

OpenTelemetry JS bundles capabilities that developers often reach for separate tools to cover:

• Auto-instrumentation: @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node automatically instruments popular frameworks and libraries (Express, HTTP, gRPC, database clients) with zero code changes — no manual span creation needed for common libraries
• Resource detection: built-in detectors for cloud providers, containers, and process info via OTEL_NODE_RESOURCE_DETECTORS — no need for custom resource-tagging middleware
• Context propagation: W3C TraceContext and Baggage propagated automatically across async boundaries when using tracer.startActiveSpan — no manual context threading required

Best Practices