Some of your customers are complaining about timeouts but your graphs show no problems, can you find the hidden timeouts? Can you see why some requests are failing? What is different about them compared to successful requests? How many times has this happened in the last week?

You have probably heard of observability and OpenTelemetry. Traces and spans are a core concept of OpenTelemetry. Spans can help you answer the questions above.
Traces are often associated with HTTP requests, but it they can be used for much more, such as database queries.
But do you know how to use span attributes and resource attributes? I will explain the differences. Do you know about span events? And how to record exceptions on a span?
In this talk I will show you how to use distributed traces in a microservices landscape using OpenTelemetry.

There are 4 parts I will talk about:
1) how to (auto)instrument your code to create spans, add attributes, record exceptions and other use cases of span events
2) how to store traces in Tempo
3) how to query for all the details to answer your questions with Grafana
4) how a service graph, created based on traces, gives an overview and helps to pinpoint the problem

After this talk, you will know how to use OpenTelemetry to enrich your spans and how to find those spans with relevant information.
Join this talk to supercharge your spans and help you answer all these questions!