Practical observability: distributed tracing with otel4s

This article explains how to use otel4s for tracing in real applications, with a focus on span creation, context flows, trace boundaries, and integration with OpenTelemetry Java SDK. It highlights runtime behavior and API design.

Scala

OpenTelemetry

otel4s

observability

distributed

tracing

December 14, 2025 • 17 min read

Practical observability: foundations with OpenTelemetry

In this series, we explore how to bring observability into a Scala application using OpenTelemetry - the open standard for telemetry data - and otel4s, a purely functional OpenTelemetry library for the Typelevel (Cats Effect) ecosystem. Series roadmap …

August 2, 2024 • 6 min read

Publishing test traces to Grafana using otel4s and weaver

Let's explore how we can publish test traces to Grafana Cloud using otel4s and weaver while running tests on GitHub Action. Even though CI machines often differ from production environments, and recorded spans might be volatile, we can still collect enough evidence to analyze sys…

January 9, 2020 • 4 min read

Scala 2: boilerplate-free type class definition

The development of an application requires design decisions. Fairly often a functional application is being designed around ad-hoc polymorphism. Ad-hoc polymorphism refers to when a value is able to adopt any one of several types because it, or a value it uses, has been given a …