Author: Lahiru Hewawasam

As with back-end development, observability is becoming increasingly crucial in front-end development, especially when it comes to troubleshooting. For example, imagine a simple e-commerce application that includes a mobile app, web server, and database. If a user reports that the app is freezing while attempting to make a purchase, it can be challenging to determine the root cause of the problem. That's where OpenTelemetry comes in.

This article will dive into how front-end developers can leverage OpenTelemetry to improve observability and efficiently troubleshoot issues like this one.

When organizations move toward the cloud, their systems also lean toward distributed architectures. One of the most common examples is the adoption of microservices. However, this also creates new challenges when it comes to observability.

You need to find the right tools to monitor, track and trace these systems by analyzing outputs through metrics, logs, and traces. It enables teams to quickly pinpoint the root cause of issues, fix them and optimize the application performance, giving them the confidence to deliver code faster.

What Is Distributed Tracing?

The rise of microservices has enabled users to create distributed applications that consist of modular services rather than a single functional unit. This modularity makes testing and deployment easier while preventing a single point of failure with the application.

While applications begin to scale and distribute their resources amongst multiple cloud-native services, tracing a single transaction becomes tedious and nearly impossible. Hence, developers need to apply distributed tracing techniques.