What is distributed tracing in OpenTelemetry?

It chains requests across services into visual spans, starting from your app to backend and DB, using trace headers like W3C format.

How do you set up Grafana Tempo for Android tracing?

Instrument Retrofit with OkHttpTelemetry, add user/device attributes via interceptors, send spans to Tempo collector—manual on Android, auto on Spring Boot.

Can tracing correlate with logs and metrics?

Yes—use trace_id/span_id in Loki metadata for log links, exemplars in Prometheus for metrics. Filter by device for session-like debugging.

⚙️ DevOps & Platform Eng

Chasing Ghosts: Real Distributed Tracing from Android to Your Database

A 1.91-second trace lights up your screen: Android request crawling through Spring Boot, choking on DB queries. Finally, someone shows how to wire it without the vendor lock-in.

theAIcatchup Apr 08, 2026 4 min read

Distributed tracing visualization in Grafana Tempo from Android app through Spring Boot to database spans

⚡ Key Takeaways

Distributed tracing shines when correlated to logs/metrics—spans alone are just charts. 𝕏
Android needs manual OpenTelemetry instrumentation; no auto-agent magic. 𝕏
Grafana Tempo scales free, but watch cardinality in Prometheus. 𝕏

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theAIcatchup

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#OpenTelemetry #android-instrumentation #distributed tracing #full-stack observability #grafana tempo

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Originally reported by dev.to

⚡ Key Takeaways

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