OpenTelemetry for Node.js: Distributed Tracing Without Vendor Lock-in

The Problem with Observability Silos You have logs in CloudWatch, metrics in Datadog, and traces in a different tool. Correlating a slow request across three systems is a manual nightmare. OpenTelemetry (OTel) standardizes how you emit telemetry—then send it anywhere. Core Concepts Traces: The journey of a request through your system Spans: Individual operations within a trace Metrics: Numerical measurements over time Logs: Timestamped events (OTel correlates these with traces) Setup npm install @opentelemetry/sdk-node \ @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node \ @opentelemetry/exporter-trace-otlp-http \ @opentelemetry/exporter-metrics-otlp-http // instrumentation.ts — load BEFORE everything else import { NodeSDK } from '@opentelemetry/sdk-node'; import { getNodeAutoInstrumentations } from '@opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node'; import { OTLPTraceExporter } from '@opentelemetry/exporter-trace-otlp-http'; import { OTLPMetricExporter } from '@opentelemetry/exporter-metrics-otlp-htt