One of the qualities of engineering team excellence is thinking outside the box to find creative solutions to hard problems. It’s our responsibility, as dev leaders, to pass on to the next generations of developers tips and tricks to help them look beyond the surface to solve complex business problems and leverage the power of the open source community, when possible.

Modern applications are becoming increasingly distributed due to a wide range of benefits including enhanced scalability, high availability, fault tolerance, and better geographical distribution. But it also makes the overall system complex making it challenging to understand how they function internally. Distributed tracing helps to address it by tracking how requests flow through various system components with detailed insights.

Serverless, as you may already know, is a cloud computing model where the cloud provider dynamically manages and allocates resources to execute code without the need for server provisioning or infrastructure management on the developer. This article overviews serverless observability, monitoring, and debugging, based on distributed tracing and OpenTelemetry (OTel).

Monitoring APIs through enhanced observability has gained traction with the popularity of microservices. Since microservice applications are built as independent and scalable modules, the number of microservices can grow dramatically as the application grows, increasing the complexity drastically. Since APIs work as the connective tissue between microservices, the number of APIs also grows in parallel.