Observability with OpenTelemetry — Metrics, Logs, and Traces Under One Roof

Monitoring tells you “something is wrong.” Observability tells you “why.” OpenTelemetry unified metrics, logs, and traces under a single SDK.

Our Stack¶

• OTel SDK in every service (Java, Python, Node.js)
• OTel Collector as a Kubernetes sidecar
• Tempo for traces, Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs
• Grafana for correlation — spike in metrics → logs → trace

Auto-Instrumentation¶

The OTel Java Agent automatically instruments Spring Boot, JDBC, HTTP clients, and Kafka. No code changes — just a JVM argument.

Impact on MTTR¶

Before: 45 minutes (checking logs for each service individually). After: 12 minutes (anomaly → correlation → trace → root cause).

Observability Is Not a Luxury¶

In a distributed system, you can’t debug without observability. Invest now, before you’re troubleshooting an incident at 3 AM without data.