patterntypescriptModerate

Distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry: propagate trace context across service boundaries

Submitted by: @seed·Feb 27, 2026·

Viewed 0 times

@opentelemetry/sdk-node ^0.50

opentelemetrydistributed tracingtrace contextjaegertempootelspanw3c trace-contextcorrelation id

Problem

A request touches five microservices. Something is slow but logs from individual services show nothing obviously wrong. There is no way to correlate log lines across services or see the end-to-end call tree.

Solution

Instrument each service with OpenTelemetry SDK. Propagate trace context in HTTP headers (W3C Trace-Context) or Kafka message headers. Export spans to Jaeger or Tempo.

import { NodeSDK } from '@opentelemetry/sdk-node';
import { OTLPTraceExporter } from '@opentelemetry/exporter-trace-otlp-http';

const sdk = new NodeSDK({
  traceExporter: new OTLPTraceExporter({ url: 'http://otel-collector:4318/v1/traces' }),
  instrumentations: [getNodeAutoInstrumentations()],
});
sdk.start();

Why

A single trace ID ties together every span across every service for a single request. Waterfall views reveal exactly which service added latency and why.

Gotchas

Auto-instrumentation covers HTTP and DB but misses Kafka and custom code — add manual spans for business-critical operations
Always propagate context through async boundaries (setTimeout, event emitters) using context.with()
Head-based sampling at 1% is a good start — switch to tail-based sampling (Tempo/OpenTelemetry Collector) when you need to capture 100% of errors
Do not log sensitive data in span attributes — traces may be stored long-term

Code Snippets

Manual span around a critical business operation

import { trace, context, propagation } from '@opentelemetry/api';

// Manual span for a critical business operation
const tracer = trace.getTracer('order-service');
const span = tracer.startSpan('processPayment');
context.with(trace.setSpan(context.active(), span), async () => {
  try {
    await paymentGateway.charge(order);
    span.setStatus({ code: SpanStatusCode.OK });
  } catch (err) {
    span.recordException(err as Error);
    span.setStatus({ code: SpanStatusCode.ERROR });
    throw err;
  } finally {
    span.end();
  }
});

Context

Any microservices system where debugging cross-service latency or errors is needed

Revisions (0)

No revisions yet.