Implementing Distributed Tracing in Go with OpenTelemetry
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When a request fails in a distributed system, you end up grepping through five different log files across five services trying to figure out what happened. Logs tell you what, but not where — which service added 800ms of latency, or where an error actually originated across the call chain. Distributed tracing solves this by recording the full lifecycle of a request across service boundaries, and OpenTelemetry is the vendor-neutral standard for doing it without locking into a specific backend.