How to get distributed tracing across TypeScript microservices without manual instrumentation

1 day ago 1
ARTICLE AD BOX

I'm building a backend with about 8 TypeScript microservices. Right now I'm manually wiring up OpenTelemetry in each service - setting up the SDK, creating spans, propagating trace context through headers, configuring exporters to Jaeger. It's a lot of boilerplate and every new service needs the same setup.

Is there a TypeScript backend framework or tool that provides distributed tracing out of the box, without needing to manually instrument every service?

I've looked at:

OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation for Node.js - covers HTTP and some libraries but misses custom service-to-service calls and doesn't understand my service boundaries

Datadog APM - good but expensive and still needs agent setup per service

AWS X-Ray - tied to AWS and requires SDK integration

I'd love something that just works for service-to-service calls, database queries, and Pub/Sub without me touching instrumentation code.

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