System Design

Distributed Tracing with OpenTelemetry

System Design diagram · made in Skemio

Architecture diagram of an OpenTelemetry distributed tracing pipeline showing clients, API gateway, microservices passing trace headers, and exporting to an OTel Collector and Tempo visualizer.
Architecture diagram of an OpenTelemetry distributed tracing pipeline showing clients, API gateway, microservices passing trace headers, and exporting to an OTel Collector and Tempo visualizer.
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What it shows

  • W3C traceparent headers propagate span IDs across HTTP and RPC calls.
  • OTel Collector batches, samples, and scrubs PII before exporting traces.
  • Jaeger or Tempo indexes traces for sub-second bottleneck discovery.

The takeaway

Context propagation turns fragmented microservice logs into one coherent call graph.

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