Topic
Instrument it, learn to query it, then point it at something that thinks.
I added Grafana's all-in-one otel-lgtm image next to this site's Scala/Play backend: an OpenTelemetry Java agent and Traefik send OTLP to it, Keycloak gates Grafana to one email, and the collector strips query strings. Here is the setup, the guardrails, and what the first traces showed.
Wiring Spring Boot 4 + Spring Batch 6 to emit job/step traces into Tempo and spring_batch_* metrics into Prometheus — and the four config traps that each failed the same way: green build, zero errors, nothing exported.
If you distribute a Claude Code agent to a marketplace, every developer who runs it spends your reasoning budget and yours to answer for. Here is how I wired Claude Code's built-in OpenTelemetry into a Grafana/LGTM stack to watch cost, tokens and tool decisions — per run.
TraceQL has a tiny surface area but a few sharp edges. Here is the mental model — span scopes, the spanset, aggregates, and structural operators — that makes it click and stops the silent zero-result queries.
Wiring OpenTelemetry into Spring Boot 4 — the annotation way and the manual Tracer way — plus the context model that ties them together and the gotchas that cost me time (a silent @WithSpan, http/protobuf vs gRPC, and Docker's 'is a directory').
Posts that touch this subject but live under another topic.
Building agents on the JVM with Embabel · Part 5
I pointed my Embabel agents at a local Grafana LGTM stack and saw nothing. Three configuration gotchas later, every GOAP planning step, LLM call and tool loop shows up as a span in Tempo. Here is the full walkthrough, with screenshots.