Recent posts tagged opentelemetry

A support agent passes every eval in staging. In production the same agent is reached three ways: from an IDE over MCP, from the web app over the OpenAI Responses API, and from a triage agent over A2A. The dashboard stays green for weeks. Then a cust...

Stop Paying $0.05 Per Trace: Building an OTel-Native LLM Cost Attribution Gateway When deploying generative AI into production, the second line item on your cloud bill isn't inference—it's the telemetry tax. Commercial LLM observability tools charg...

An observability-first approach for building an AI agent, and what it bought me. A couple of weeks ago I started implementing Kept, a self-hostable post-purchase support agent for e-commerce, with reliability as its core offering. Besides the produc...

I ran a penetration test on my own infrastructure last week. No Burp Suite, no exploit fired at production, no CVE popped. The whole engagement came down to one habit: refusing to believe a control was working until I had watched it work. The target...

A trace is one of the more useful things you can capture from an LLM app, and many teams store it in a format they cannot move later. If your AI tracing uses its own private format, the spans sit in a silo, a backend change means re-instrumenting, an...

Every LLM tool invents its own tracing format. Langfuse has one. Helicone has one. Arize has one. If you built your own — congratulations, you have one too. OpenTelemetry just published a standard for all of them. It defines how to name spans, what...

TL;DR Distributed tracing helps you understand how requests flow through microservices by tracking every hop with minimal overhead. This guide covers OpenTelemetry integration in Spring Boot 4 using the native starter, explains core concepts like s...

Last week, I described several approaches to OpenTelemetry on the JVMhttps://blog.frankel.ch/opentelemetry-tracing-jvm/, their requirements, and their different results. This week, I want to highlight several gotchas found across stacks in the zero-c...

You may know I'm a big fan of OpenTelemetry. I recently finished developing a master class for the YOW! conferencehttps://yowcon.com/melbourne-2025/masterclasses/560/gain-practical-in-depth-experience-with-observability-using-opentelemetry at the end...

I have presented my OpenTelemetry demohttps://github.com/nfrankel/opentelemetry-tracing many times, and I still do. Each time, the audience is different. To make no two presentations the same, I always ask attendees what stack they are more intereste...