Learn OpenTelemetry Tracing With This Lightweight Microservices Demo

OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework for cloud-native service and infrastructure instrumentation, hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It has gained significant momentum with contributions from major cloud providers and observability vendors. A trace or distributed trace represents a sequence of operations across microservices involved in fulfilling an individual request. A lightweight OpenTelemetry demo application has been developed to provide users with hands-on experience with tracing. The demo consists of a password generator overdesigned as a microservices application, including five microservices and a pre-configured observability stack composed of the OpenTelemetry Collector, Promscale, Jaeger, and Grafana. The code for each service has been instrumented to produce OpenTelemetry traces, which can be visualized using tools like Jaeger. The demo is not Promscale-specific and can be easily configured to send telemetry data to any OpenTelemetry-compatible backend.