Building a Distributed Tracing Platform on AWS using OpenTelemetry and Grafana Tempo

Modern cloud-native applications are typically built using microservices architectures , where a single user request can travel through multiple services before returning a response. While this architecture improves scalability and development speed, it also introduces a major challenge: observability . When a request fails or becomes slow, it becomes difficult to understand where exactly the problem occurred across multiple services . This is where distributed tracing becomes critical. In this blog, we will explore how to build a production-ready distributed tracing platform on AWS using OpenTelemetry and Grafana Tempo . We'll cover the architecture, implementation, and best practices. Why Distributed Tracing Matters In microservices environments, a single request may pass through multiple services such as: API Gateway Authentication service Product service Payment service Database Without tracing, engineers cannot easily determine: Which service introduced latency Where failures occu