Distributed Tracing with OpenTelemetry

This section covers instrumenting Go services with OpenTelemetry and exporting traces to the OTel Collector, compatible with vendors like Datadog, New Relic, and Splunk.

• Binaries: generator-otel, loader-otel
• Local Collector: OTLP gRPC on 4317, OTLP HTTP on 4318
• Make targets: make start_observability_stack, make run_otel_generator, make run_otel_loader

Guides

• Local setup: OTel Collector
• Vendor guides: Datadog, New Relic, Splunk
• Vendor guide: Dynatrace Integration (OTLP)

Notes:

• Dynatrace uses an OTLP HTTP exporter with an explicit compose override and environment variables, keeping the base stack vendor-neutral.
• All apps export traces to the local Collector; the Collector handles fan-out to backends (Tempo and optionally Dynatrace).