Distributed Tracing with Tempo and OpenTelemetry
Your metrics say something is slow. Your logs say errors happened. Great. Now answer me this: which request actually failed, where did the latency come from, and which service in the chain ate the timeout? Metrics and logs both shrug at that. I hit this wall the first time a checkout flow started timing out under load. Ten services in the path, every one of them green on its own dashboard, and no way to follow a single doomed request from front door to failure. That gap is exactly what distributed tracing fills. It follows one request as it moves through your services and shows you precisely what happened and where it stalled. ...