OpenTelemetry (OTel) and distributed tracing can be handy tools when you’re a developer facing what we call app flow blindness – or not being able to see your application flows and microservices components in a distributed cloud environment. In distributed environments, application flows are handled by various services and cloud entities which are generally siloed.

As engineering organizations transitioned from monolith to microservices architectures, they sought to make their development efforts more scalable and manageable. The microservices paradigm promised to increase development speed, reduce MTTR and improve quality while cutting down on maintenance costs. However, in real life, there are inherent quality caveats when it comes to developing microservices.