Node.js OpenTelemetry in Production: Distributed Tracing, Custom Spans, and OTLP

Node.js OpenTelemetry in Production: Distributed Tracing, Custom Spans, and OTLP Distributed systems fail in distributed ways. A request enters your API gateway, fans out across a dozen microservices, hits three databases, publishes to a message queue, and somewhere in that chain — something goes wrong. Without distributed tracing, you're debugging with a flashlight in a blackout. OpenTelemetry is the flashlight upgrade. This guide covers everything you need to instrument Node.js services for production: auto-instrumentation, manual spans, OTLP exporters, Jaeger and Grafana Tempo integration, W3C trace context propagation, and sampling strategies that keep your backend from drowning in telemetry data. What Is OpenTelemetry? OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) incubating project that provides a vendor-neutral, open-source observability framework for generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry data — traces, metrics, and logs. The key design principle i