The Life of a Span - OpenTelemetry Journey from Creation to Visualization

Explore the complete journey of an OpenTelemetry span in this 22-minute conference talk from CNCF, tracing its path from creation in an instrumented application to final visualization in an observability backend. Discover how spans serve as fundamental building blocks for understanding system performance, troubleshooting issues, and optimizing applications in distributed systems. Follow along as the speakers demonstrate the various OpenTelemetry components that interact with spans, including tracers, processors, exporters, and propagators, using an example application with default configurations. Gain deep insights into the mechanics of context propagation, data enrichment, and trace exporting processes that occur behind the scenes. Learn how spans flow through the OpenTelemetry pipeline, interact with other spans, and ultimately surface meaningful observability data that enables effective monitoring and debugging of cloud-native applications.