In the world of distributed systems and observability, spans are the fundamental building blocks that enable us to understand system performance, troubleshoot issues, and optimize our applications. But what really happens when a span is created? How does it flow through an OpenTelemetry pipeline, interact with other spans, and ultimately surface in an observability backend?

In this session, we’ll take a deep dive into the life of an OpenTelemetry span—from its birth in an instrumented application to its final visualization in an observability backend. We’ll explore the various components of OpenTelemetry that interact with spans, including tracers, processors, exporters, and propagators. Using an example application and relying on OpenTelemetry’s default configurations, we’ll follow the span’s journey step by step, gaining insight into how context propagation, data enrichment, and trace exporting work under the hood