Stage 1, Instrument: where spans come from

A trace has to start somewhere. Before your application can produce spans, it needs code that watches its work and records each unit of that work as a span. Adding that code or tooling is called instrumentation.

Most teams instrument with OpenTelemetry

You don’t have to write that recording code by hand. Most teams instrument with OpenTelemetry, an open, vendor-neutral standard for generating traces, and other signals, from application code. Because it’s a shared standard rather than one vendor’s format, the traces it produces work with many backends, not just one.

Setting it up comes later

This journey doesn’t instrument an application. Choosing how to instrument your code and wiring it up is part of setup, covered in the separate setup journey and the instrumentation documentation. Here, you only need to know that spans come from an instrumented application at the start of the pipeline.

A trace has to start at the source. Before an application can emit spans, something has to watch its work and record each unit of it as a span, and adding that code or tooling is instrumentation.

You don’t write that recording logic yourself. Most teams reach for OpenTelemetry, an open, vendor-neutral standard for generating traces and other signals straight from application code. Because it’s a shared standard instead of one vendor’s format, the spans it produces work with many backends, not just one.

Setting instrumentation up isn’t part of this journey. Choosing a method and wiring it in belongs to the setup journey and the instrumentation documentation. Here, the one thing to hold onto is that spans come from an instrumented application at the very start of the pipeline.

Stage 1, Instrument: where spans come from