Tracing Node.js Microservices with OpenTelemetry

Published June 30, 2023・Last updated June 20, 2026・2 min read

Regarding microservices observability, tracing is important to catch bottlenecks of the services like slow requests and database queries.

OpenTelemetry is a set of monitoring tools that support integration with distributed tracing platforms like Jaeger, Zipkin, and New Relic. This post covers Jaeger v2 tracing setup for Node.js projects.

Prerequisites

• Docker
• Node.js version 26
• OpenTelemetry packages:

npm i @opentelemetry/sdk-node @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node \
  @opentelemetry/exporter-trace-otlp-http @opentelemetry/resources \
  @opentelemetry/sdk-trace-base @opentelemetry/semantic-conventions express

Jaeger v2

Start Jaeger in all-in-one mode with Docker Compose. Jaeger UI is at http://localhost:16686. OTLP HTTP receiver listens on port 4318.

services:
  jaeger:
    image: jaegertracing/jaeger:2.19.0
    ports:
      - 16686:16686
      - 4317:4317
      - 4318:4318

Run docker compose up -d from the demo folder (see below).

OpenTelemetry setup

Send traces to Jaeger over OTLP HTTP. Use resourceFromAttributes and semantic convention constants (ATTR_SERVICE_NAME, ATTR_SERVICE_VERSION) to label the service. Auto-instrumentation picks up Express, HTTP clients, databases, and other supported libraries.

Process spans in batches with BatchSpanProcessor and shut the SDK down gracefully on SIGTERM.

import { getNodeAutoInstrumentations } from '@opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node';
import { OTLPTraceExporter } from '@opentelemetry/exporter-trace-otlp-http';
import { resourceFromAttributes } from '@opentelemetry/resources';
import { BatchSpanProcessor } from '@opentelemetry/sdk-trace-base';
import { NodeSDK } from '@opentelemetry/sdk-node';
import {
  ATTR_DEPLOYMENT_ENVIRONMENT_NAME,
  ATTR_SERVICE_NAME,
  ATTR_SERVICE_VERSION,
} from '@opentelemetry/semantic-conventions';
const traceExporter = new OTLPTraceExporter({
  url: 'http://localhost:4318/v1/traces',
});
const sdk = new NodeSDK({
  resource: resourceFromAttributes({
    [ATTR_SERVICE_NAME]: `<service-name>-${process.env.NODE_ENV ?? 'dev'}`,
    [ATTR_SERVICE_VERSION]: process.env.npm_package_version ?? '0.0.0',
    [ATTR_DEPLOYMENT_ENVIRONMENT_NAME]: process.env.NODE_ENV ?? 'dev',
  }),
  instrumentations: [getNodeAutoInstrumentations()],
  spanProcessor: new BatchSpanProcessor(traceExporter),
});
sdk.start();
process.on('SIGTERM', () => {
  sdk
    .shutdown()
    .then(() => console.log('Tracing terminated'))
    .catch((error) => console.error('Error terminating tracing', error))
    .finally(() => process.exit(0));
});

Import the tracing module before any other application code:

import './tracing.js';
// ...

Hit the app, then open Jaeger UI → Search → Service and pick your service name (for example express-starter-dev in the demo).

Demo

Runnable code for this post lives in the jaeger-tracing-demo folder. Get access via code demos.