Intermediate1 min readMay 10, 2025
OpenTelemetry in Node.js Applications
Add distributed tracing, metrics, and logs to your Node.js app with OpenTelemetry SDK.
Overview
Observability becomes much more useful when traces, metrics, and structured logs share the same request context.
Minimal setup
typescript
5 lines
1import { NodeSDK } from '@opentelemetry/sdk-node'23const sdk = new NodeSDK()45sdk.start()Instrumentation priorities
- inbound HTTP requests
- database calls
- external API requests
- background jobs
Summary
Instrument the request path first. Start where latency and failure investigation already consume the most team time.