How to Increase Trace Cardinality With OpenTelemetry

Access to high cardinality metrics provides important signals about the overall health and performance of our distributed systems. It relies on the telemetry captured from these distributed workloads to determine what really went wrong.

With OpenTelemetry, we can capture these metrics and easily auto-instrument our applications to begin gathering data quickly. While auto-instrumenting applications is the fastest way to start collecting data with no requirements of code changes, there may be several metrics to consider to better understand your deployment and narrow down application bottlenecks.

In this video, we'll show you: How to modify your OpenTelemetry configuration to include the necessary metadata to identify your workloads. How span tags can reduce your Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR).