Tutorial Beginner By Samson Tanimawo, PhD Published Oct 9, 2026 10 min read

OpenTelemetry Distributed Tracing in 45 Minutes

OTel tracing across two services. The 45 minutes cover instrumentation, collector, and viewing in Jaeger.

Step 1: SDK in service A

Install OTel SDK for your language.

Initialize tracer; instrument HTTP server.

Step 2: SDK in service B

Same as A but different serviceName.
Instrument HTTP client (auto-injects W3C Traceparent).

Step 3: Collector + Jaeger

Run OTel Collector + Jaeger via Docker Compose.

Both services export to Collector; Collector forwards to Jaeger.

Step 4: Trace propagation

Service A’s outbound HTTP call carries Traceparent.

Service B reads it; new span becomes child of A’s span.

Jaeger UI: see the cross-service trace.

Antipatterns

Manual instrumentation everywhere. Use auto-instrumentation libraries.
No sampling. Cost.
Skipping context propagation in async. Trace breaks.

What to do this week

Three moves. (1) Run the tutorial end-to-end on your own laptop / sandbox. (2) Apply the pattern to one production workload. (3) Document the variations you needed; share with the team.