Building a Distributed Tracing Platform on AWS using OpenTelemetry and Grafana Tempo

Modern cloud-native applications are typically built using microservices architectures, where a single user request can travel through multiple services before returning a response. While this architecture improves scalability and development speed, it also introduces a major challenge: observability. When a request fails or becomes slow, it becomes difficult to understand where exactly the problem occurred across multiple services. This is where distributed tracing becomes critical. In this blog, we will explore how to build a production-ready distributed tracing platform on AWS using OpenTelemetry and Grafana Tempo. We'll cover the architecture, implementation, and best practices. Why Distributed Tracing Matters In microservices environments, a single request may pass through multiple services such as: API Gateway Authentication service Product service Payment service Database Without tracing, engineers cannot easily determine: Which service introduced latency Where failures occurred