OpenTelemetry in Production: Traces, Context, and What Actually Matters

Why OpenTelemetry Won Three years ago, the observability landscape was fragmented. Jaeger for tracing, Prometheus for metrics, Fluentd for logs, each with its own SDK, its own protocol, its own vendor lock-in. OpenTelemetry unified them into a single standard: one SDK, one protocol (OTLP), one collector that routes to any backend. We adopted OpenTelemetry across our production systems. This article covers the patterns that actually matter in production, not the setup tutorial. For the broader ob