Your API endpoint takes 800ms to respond — but where do those milliseconds actually go? Is it a slow database query? A sluggish call to an external service? Without the right tools, you're just guessing. Google Cloud Platform's Cloud Trace answers this question directly, using SDKs built on the OpenTelemetry (OTel) standard. Instead of paying for an expensive third-party APM, you can build an observability solution with Cloud Trace, logging, monitoring, and error alerts — all within GCP.

In this talk, you'll learn how to set up Cloud Trace for a TypeScript Node.js (Express.js) application running on Cloud Run and connected to a Postgres Cloud SQL database. We'll walk through configuring the OpenTelemetry SDK and instrumentation libraries to send trace data to Cloud Trace, then show you how to redact Personally Identifiable Information (PII) before that data is sent — making your setup production-ready.

By the end of this hands-on session, you'll be able to trace every millisecond of your API's response time, from the first database query to the last external call. You can't improve what you don't measure.