OpenTelemetry SDK Node

A production-ready NodeSDK wrapper for OpenTelemetry, enabling end-to-end distributed tracing across microservices with Zero-Code instrumentation injection.

System Architecture

Key Engineering Decisions

1. Zero-Code Auto Instrumentation

Rather than manually creating spans recursively, this architecture utilizes @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node. This hooks directly into the Node.js diagnostics_channel and patches standard libraries (fs, http, pg, redis) to automatically generate spans.

2. Log Correlation Pipeline

Traces are useless without context. The custom pino logger implementation automatically reads the active SpanContext from the OpenTelemetry API and injects trace_id and span_id directly into the JSON log payload.

// Seamless Context Extraction inside Pino Log Hook
const spanContext = opentelemetry.trace.getSpanContext(opentelemetry.context.active());
if (spanContext) {
  logObject.trace_id = spanContext.traceId;
  logObject.span_id = spanContext.spanId;
}

3. Vendor Agnostic Collection

By routing all signals to a local otel-collector-contrib instance over gRPC, the Node application is entirely decoupled from the underlying vendor (e.g. Datadog vs New Relic). The collector handles the authentication, batching, and routing independently.