Distributed Tracing with OpenTelemetry: From Instrumentation to Visualization

A practical checklist for adding OpenTelemetry tracing to your services, shipping spans through the Collector, and turning that data into something you can actually debug with.

12items

Back to all checklists

ObservabilityIntermediate

opentelemetrydistributed-tracingobservabilityoteltracing

Progress0 / 12 completed

Map your services and pick the first flows to trace

Critical

Deploy the OpenTelemetry Collector as your trace hub

Critical

Add auto-instrumentation to your applications

Critical

Propagate trace context across every service boundary

Critical

Pick a sampling strategy before your bill explodes

Critical

Use semantic conventions for span attributes

Never put secrets, tokens, or PII in span attributes

Critical

Correlate traces with logs and metrics

Stand up a tracing backend and visualize your first traces

Use traces to find latency hot spots, not just admire them

Monitor the Collector itself

Write a one-page tracing runbook for your team

More checklists

DevOps

Monitoring & Observability Checklist

Comprehensive checklist for implementing monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting across your infrastructure and applications.

60-90 minutes

API Design

Designing Rate Limiting for APIs: Algorithms, Patterns, and Implementation

Pick the right rate limiting algorithm for your traffic shape, build it on shared atomic state, and ship it with the response headers, failure modes, and monitoring that keep both your API and your clients working.

2-3 hours

GitOps

Argo CD Multi-Environment Repository Structure Checklist

How to organize your Git repositories when running Argo CD across dev, staging, and production. Covers folder layout, app-of-apps, ApplicationSets, secrets, RBAC, and promotion flow.

60-90 minutes

Also worth your time on this topic

Interview

Traces and Spans Explained

A request hits your API gateway, which calls two backend services, and one of those queries a database. Walk me through what that looks like as a distributed trace. What is a span, and how do spans connect to each other?

junior

Article