Instrumenting Message Queues? Autotel Handles the Ceremony

18 Jan 2026

The OneUptime team is spot on in their Instrument Message Queues with OpenTelemetry post.

Inject trace context on the producer, extract on the consumer; use PRODUCER and CONSUMER span kinds; set semantic conventions (messaging.system, messaging.destination.name, messaging.operation, Kafka partition/offset/consumer group).

They show the raw OpenTelemetry code. It's comprehensive. It's also verbose. Every team ends up re-implementing the same patterns: inject, extract, span kinds, semantic attributes, error handling.

We've all been there: copying "best practice" code from blog posts and adapting it for our broker.

Their key insight:

For batch processing, use a batch span with links or child spans to contributing traces.

But there's still a gap...

End-to-End Tracing? Autotel Makes It Automatic

15 Jan 2026

The OSO team is spot on in their End-to-End Tracing in Event Driven Architectures post.

Traces break at queues unless you extract context from message headers and put it in the appropriate context.

They walk through the real pain: stateful processing loses trace context in caches, Kafka Connect can only do batch-level tracing, and every team ends up writing custom interceptors and state store wrappers.

We've all been there.

Their key insight:

In Kafka Streams and Kafka Connect this often means manual work: interceptors, state stores, batch spans, or extending tracing logic to extract from headers.

But there's still a gap...

Arrange Act Assert

Jag Reehals thinking on things, mostly product development

Tag: tracing

Instrumenting Message Queues? Autotel Handles the Ceremony

End-to-End Tracing? Autotel Makes It Automatic