KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020

There's been a lot of talk about the importance of observability and tracing for microservice-based applications. The use cases involved are focused on backend engineers and DevOps. But what about us front-end engineers? Often, we get blamed first when something breaks and the lack of consistent observability tools makes it difficult to debug issues.

With the emergence of OpenTelemetry for JavaScript, more front-end developers are looking to instrument their code and connect their traces with the backend. A growing number of teams are adopting GraphQL as their interface between UI and backend as well. This talk will illustrate the process of setting up your app for tracing with OpenTelemetry, show what’s common in GraphQL instrumentation compared to other libraries and describe the potential pitfalls of the approach. Building on that, we will discuss how tracing affects user experience.