Modern distributed systems require structured observability without sacrificing developer velocity or introducing technical debt. What We're Building We are constructing a high-throughput Rust API service that automatically traces HTTP requests from the first incoming header to the final response. The goal is to demonstrate how to integrate OpenTelemetry (OTLP) into a production-grade Rust stack using minimal boilerplate while maintaining async context. We will avoid external managed SDKs in favor of the standard opentelemetry crates, ensuring full control over the telemetry pipeline. This approach applies to any backend service written in Rust, whether it runs on Kubernetes or local infrastructure. Step 1 — Initialize the Global Provider Before recording any telemetry data, you must configure the global Provider to handle context propagation and resource attributes. This step ensures that the OpenTelemetry SDK manages the lifecycle of the trace pipeline without manual resource cleanup.…