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How do you add OpenTelemetry distributed tracing to a Node.js service?

Q: How do you add OpenTelemetry distributed tracing to a Node.js service?

**TL;DR.** **OpenTelemetry** auto-instruments HTTP/DB clients to create **spans**, **propagates a trace context** header across service boundaries, and **exports** traces to a collector/backend (Jaeger, Tempo). It lets you follow **one request end-to-end** across multiple services, seeing where the latency actually goes. svc A span 1 traceparent svc B <text class='d-sub' x='197' y='91' text-anchor='

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Understand the problem

Spans, context propagation, and exporters across services.

nodejsobservabilityopentelemetrytracing

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Read the code

Bootstrap auto-instrumentation

// tracing.js — imported FIRST (node --import ./tracing.js app.js)
import { NodeSDK } from '@opentelemetry/sdk-node';
import { getNodeAutoInstrumentations } from '@opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node';
import { OTLPTraceExporter } from '@opentelemetry/exporter-trace-otlp-http';

new NodeSDK({
  traceExporter: new OTLPTraceExporter(),         // → collector
  instrumentations: [getNodeAutoInstrumentations()],
}).start();
// http/express/db spans now created + traceparent propagated automatically.

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