Do I need to fully migrate to OpenTelemetry to get value?

No. Start with your ingress/edge and the top 2–5 services on the critical path. Use auto‑instrumentation where possible and add manual spans only on those routes. You can run the OpenTelemetry Collector side‑by‑side with existing Jaeger/Zipkin agents.

Isn’t tracing too expensive at scale?

It is if you keep every trace. Tail‑based sampling keeps errors, slow traces, and enterprise tier traffic while downsampling the rest. Combine with short retention (7–14 days) and cheap backends like Grafana Tempo or Jaeger+ClickHouse.

How do I connect traces to canary automation?

Use the Collector’s `spanmetrics` connector to emit Prometheus metrics with exemplars. Then write PromQL for leading indicators and plug them into Argo Rollouts or Flagger analysis templates. Exemplars let on‑call jump straight from a spike to a representative trace.

What about async and event‑driven systems?

Use span links to connect producers to consumers. Propagate `traceparent` in message headers (Kafka, SQS) and add `messaging.operation` spans. It won’t be a single linear trace, but links preserve causality and let you compute fan‑out and queue wait time.

How do I prevent PII from leaking into traces?

Scrub at the Collector using the `attributes` processor to drop/sanitize keys, and enforce linting rules in CI to block new PII attributes. Never put payloads into span attributes—use opaque IDs.

Reliability-observability · Oct 8, 2025 · 10 minute read

Tracing the Blast Radius: Distributed Tracing as Your Early‑Warning System (and Release Gate)

Vanity dashboards won’t save you at 3 a.m. Traces will—if you wire them to prediction, triage, and rollout controls.

R. J. Hanley

Partner, GitPlumbers

20-year SRE/Platform vet. Ex-Netflix and two unicorns. Built tracing, SLOs, and progressive delivery pipelines that ship 100+ times/day without pager fatigue.

Traces are the unit of causality. When you promote them to first‑class signals, your rollout pipeline stops shipping surprises.

Back to all posts

Tracing the Blast Radius: Distributed Tracing as Your Early‑Warning System (and Release Gate)

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist