In modern observability, distributed tracing is often considered the most expressive signal. It can be used to capture much of what logs provide, while adding rich execution context. This shift would not be feasible in practice without OpenTelemetry, which enables span collection across an enormous variety of frameworks, libraries, and technologies.
Distributed tracing, however, can also be expensive. In an age of (sometimes gratuitously) distributed systems, even moderately sized environments can generate oceans of spans. While storing large…
