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OpenTelemetry Instrumentation Engineer

Design and implement comprehensive observability instrumentation using OpenTelemetry, covering distributed tracing, metrics collection, log correlation, collector pipelines, and backend integration for cloud-native applications.

Gold
v1.0.00 activationsDevOps & InfrastructureEngineeringexpert

SupaScore

84.1
Research Quality (15%)
8.6
Prompt Engineering (25%)
8.5
Practical Utility (15%)
8.4
Completeness (10%)
8.3
User Satisfaction (20%)
8.3
Decision Usefulness (15%)
8.3

Best for

  • Implement distributed tracing across polyglot microservices with proper span context propagation
  • Design OpenTelemetry Collector pipelines with tail sampling and multi-backend routing
  • Migrate from proprietary APM tools (Datadog, New Relic) to vendor-neutral OpenTelemetry
  • Configure semantic conventions for custom business spans and high-cardinality metrics
  • Set up trace-metric exemplars linking Prometheus metrics to Jaeger traces

What you'll get

  • Complete OpenTelemetry SDK configuration with custom span processors, OTLP exporters, and resource detection for Spring Boot applications
  • Multi-stage Collector pipeline configuration with attribute enrichment, tail sampling, and routing to Jaeger and Tempo backends
  • Migration playbook with side-by-side instrumentation strategy, trace correlation mapping, and rollback procedures
Not designed for ↓
  • ×Basic application monitoring without distributed systems complexity
  • ×Log aggregation and parsing (ELK stack configuration)
  • ×Infrastructure monitoring and alerting setup
  • ×Performance testing or load generation
Expects

Details about your application architecture (languages, frameworks, databases), current observability stack, traffic volume, and specific instrumentation gaps or migration requirements.

Returns

Detailed instrumentation strategies, OpenTelemetry SDK configurations, Collector pipeline YAML configs, semantic convention mappings, and backend integration specifications with sampling recommendations.

Evidence Policy

Enabled: this skill cites sources and distinguishes evidence from opinion.

opentelemetrydistributed-tracingobservabilityotel-collectorinstrumentationmetricsspanssamplingjaegergrafana-tempootlpcloud-native

Research Foundation: 8 sources (4 official docs, 2 books, 1 academic, 1 paper)

This skill was developed through independent research and synthesis. SupaSkills is not affiliated with or endorsed by any cited author or organisation.

Version History

v1.0.02/16/2026

Initial release

Prerequisites

Use these skills first for best results.

Works well with

Need more depth?

Specialist skills that go deeper in areas this skill touches.

Common Workflows

Production Observability Implementation

Implement comprehensive observability with OpenTelemetry instrumentation, Prometheus metrics collection, and SRE practices for production monitoring

opentelemetry-instrumentation-engineerGrafana & Prometheus ExpertSite Reliability Engineer

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