OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a vendor-neutral, standard for observing distributed applications. With OTel, you can trace individual requests and view specific metrics about the system's current state. It's like a superset of traditional logging and can be used with, or instead of, log statements. The goal of OpenTelemetry is to make observing distributed applications much easier. Something that is very difficult with traditional logging techniques.

In this session, we'll review the basics of OpenTelemetry, discuss why you should consider using it, and go over a code demo using it across distributed backend services.