Next-Level Observability with OpenTelemetry

When something goes wrong in my applications, logging is almost always the first tool I reach for. I'll throw a few log statements at the start and end of a function, sprinkle some into the exception handlers, and I'll have a basic picture of what's happening. For simple services running on a single instance, that's usually enough; I can scroll through the log file, spot the error, and trace it back to its cause. But as my systems have grown, that same approach doesn't work. Logs pile up from multiple sources, executions start interleaving, and the error I'm staring at no longer tells me enough. I can see that something failed, but I can't trace why . In this tutorial, I'll walk you through how I moved beyond basic logging by instrumenting a Kotlin and Spring Boot backend service with OpenTelemetry . You'll learn how OpenTelemetry's tracing model gives you the execution context that logs alone can't provide. By the end of this guide, you'll have a working instrumented service and a cle