APIs provide a way to simplify development, reduce costs, and create more flexible and scalable applications. Much of today’s development relies on APIs – in the integration of third-party services, in the communication between microservices, in mobile app development, and in other use cases. Some APIs even exist as products themselves for customers to use.

Adopting a distributed tracing solution to make an application more observable and maintainable is one of the most common key initiatives modern R&D teams have on their plates currently. With the move to microservices architectures, development teams are finding that it’s taking them longer to build applications due to tasks that are growing in complexity.

OpenTelemetry (OTel in short) is an open-source observability framework that provides a standard set of vendor-agonistic SDKs, APIs, and tools to connect with observability backends. It supports all major programming languages, including Java, Python, Node.js, and Go. However, Golang tracing by integrating OTel with Golang is particularly challenging due to several reasons.