A self-paced course · concept-first · lots of diagrams

OpenTelemetry & Distributed Tracing

Becoming expert in OpenTelemetry — its architecture first — then Jaeger and Dynatrace, in the context of a Spring Boot 3.x service that traces requests with Micrometer and exports over OTLP.

app + Micrometer → OTel API → SDK → exporter → OTLP :4317/:4318 → [Collector] → Jaeger / Dynatrace └──────────────── produce + ship (OpenTelemetry) ────────────────┘ └── store + display ──┘

Lessons

OpenTelemetry: the architecture, from zero

The pipeline and its components; the producer/backend boundary; trace vs span; the three signals.

Ready

Context propagation: traceparent & baggage

How a trace crosses a process boundary; the header field by field; baggage, and why it never shows up in Jaeger.

Ready

The Spring Boot 3.x tracing stack, layer by layer

Observation API → Micrometer Tracing → OTel bridge → Actuator → OTLP export. Dissecting the "meeting setup".

Ready

Jaeger, hands-on

Stand up Jaeger locally, generate a trace, read the waterfall.

The Collector, sampling, and Dynatrace ingestion

Receivers→processors→exporters; head vs tail sampling; the three ways Dynatrace takes OTel data.

Planned

Reference

This is a living course. Lessons are short and end in self-marking quizzes with instant feedback. Work through Lesson 1, then the rest unlock in order. New lessons appear here as they're built.

OpenTelemetry & Distributed Tracing Start → Lesson 01