Instrument for distributed tracing

Client instrumentation is the first building block to a functioning distributed tracing visualization pipeline. Client instrumentation is the process of adding instrumentation points in the application that create and offload spans.

Check out these resources for help instrumenting tracing with your favorite languages. Most of these guides include complete end-to-end examples with Grafana, Loki, and Tempo.

Instrumentation frameworks

Most of the popular client instrumentation frameworks have SDKs in the most commonly used programming languages. You should pick one according to your application needs.

OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation

Some languages have support for auto-instrumentation. These libraries capture telemetry information from a client application with minimal manual instrumentation of the codebase.