APIs are the building blocks of our modern world. As the world becomes more interconnected, we need reliable and performant APIs to ensure the best experience for our end users. Many developers are starting to use GraphQL to provide a monolithic facade on top of their complex microservice architecture. In turn, making their next-generation APIs fast, flexible, and developer-friendly.
But using GraphQL also introduces many new challenges when isolating failures and troubleshooting performance issues. Can OpenTelemetry help solve those challenges?

During this talk, we will:
1. Give a brief overview of OpenTelemetry as a technology
2. Investigate common challenges developers and SREs might encounter when running GraphQL in production
3. Explore how OpenTelemetry can help deal with these issues
4. Discuss what needs to be improved to make OTel even more valuable for the community