OpenTelemetry in .NET Microservices: A Practical Guide to Observable Distributed Systems

You've deployed your fifth microservice. Requests flow through an API gateway, hit an order service, fan out to inventory and payment, and eventually land in a notification pipeline. Everything works — until it doesn't. A customer reports that checkout takes 12 seconds. Your logs show nothing unusual. Your metrics say average latency is fine. But somewhere in that chain of services, something is dragging, and you have no idea where. This is the observability gap that kills microservice architect