Production Observability Setup
OpenTelemetry Instrumentation
Vendor-neutral tracing, so the backend decision stays reversible.
- Turnaround
- 2 week sprint
- Who it is for
- Teams adopting tracing, or wanting to leave a tracing vendor.
01 — The problem
Instrumentation written against a vendor SDK locks you to that vendor’s pricing forever. OpenTelemetry costs a little more up front and keeps the exit open.
02 — What is included
Exactly what you get, and nothing vague.
- Collector deployment with processing and sampling at the edge
- Auto-instrumentation where it suffices, manual spans where it does not
- Trace context propagation across service and queue boundaries
- Sampling strategy that keeps the traces you need and drops the rest
- Backend-agnostic export, so the vendor choice stays reversible
03 — What this usually finds
The recurring ones, named up front.
- Traces that stop at the first asynchronous boundary
- Head sampling discarding exactly the slow requests you wanted
- Service names inconsistent enough to break the dependency map
- No correlation between traces and logs
Listed because they recur, not because they are guaranteed. The audit reports what is actually there.
Next step
Twenty minutes to find out whether this is worth doing.
Every engagement runs under a signed mutual NDA with a read-only IAM role. If the audit would not pay for itself, I will say so on the call.