Node.js OpenTelemetry in Production: Distributed Tracing from Zero to Jaeger

Node.js OpenTelemetry in Production: Distributed Tracing from Zero to Jaeger You deployed microservices. A request fails in production. The error is in service D — but the root cause is in service A. Without distributed tracing, you're hunting through four separate log streams with no thread to pull. OpenTelemetry (OTel) is the industry-standard, vendor-neutral observability framework that solves this. It lets you trace a request as it flows through every service, measure where time is actually spent, and correlate logs across the entire call stack — without locking you into any single vendor. This is a production-grade guide. By the end you'll have working auto-instrumentation, manual spans, OTLP export, and trace context propagation in a multi-service Node.js app. What OpenTelemetry Actually Is OpenTelemetry is three things unified under one SDK: Signal What it captures OTel component Traces End-to-end request flows, latency per hop Tracer API + SDK Metrics Counters, histograms, gaug