Let’s be honest: when users say “your app is slow,” what they mean is “I want you to magically fix something without any actionable data.” And like the responsible developer you are, you do what every APEX professional does:
- open the Activity Monitor
- stare at logs
- swear a bit
- pray to the PL/SQL gods
- blame ORDS
- then try again

OpenTelemetry finally ends this madness.

With built-in support in Oracle APEX, you can now trace requests end-to-end — from browser click to SQL execution and all the weird stuff in between. Think of it as having X-ray vision for your application, except it doesn’t require gamma radiation or a tragic backstory.

In this session, we’ll explore what OpenTelemetry is (spoiler: open, standard, not another Oracle-only thing), why it’s the coolest addition to APEX in years, and how it turns debugging from a séance into a science. We’ll follow real traces, catch slow database calls in the act, confront laggy REST services, and build dashboards that make you look like a productivity wizard.

If you’ve ever wished you could answer “why is this slow?” without sweating, guessing, or summoning dbms_output, OpenTelemetry is your new best friend.

Oracle APEX now speaks OpenTelemetry — and that is a big deal. For the first time, you can capture real distributed traces, metrics, and logs from your APEX applications and follow a user request as it flows through ORDS, PL/SQL, SQL, REST calls, and external services. No more blind debugging sessions, no more “works on my machine,” and definitely no more guessing.

This session shows why observability matters, how OpenTelemetry works, and how APEX developers can use it today to get actionable insight into performance, bottlenecks, and application behaviour. Best of all? You don’t need to be a DevOps guru to start using it.

Key Takeaways

- Why OpenTelemetry matters: What observability is, and why logging alone is not enough.
- End-to-end request tracing: Follow APEX calls through ORDS, PL/SQL, SQL, REST services, and more.
- APEX + ORDS integration: What is captured out of the box and how to configure it.
- Real-world debugging superpowers: Identify slow queries, broken integrations, and hidden bottlenecks.
- Tooling options: Use Jaeger, Zipkin, Grafana, OCI Observability, or any OpenTelemetry-compatible backend.
- Zero vendor lock-in: Standardised telemetry that works everywhere.
- How to start quickly: Minimal setup steps to get dashboards and traces flowing within minutes.