OpenTelemetry Auto-Instrumentation on Kubernetes: Zero-Code Observability That Actually Works
Last week I inherited a cluster with around 40 microservices. Observability was close to nonexistent: basic Prometheus metrics, plus a few random log lines. The team wanted distributed tracing “by next sprint.” There was no realistic way to touch app code across a dozen repos in two weeks. So I chose OpenTelemetry Operator auto-instrumentation. This is what happened in practice. The Setup We run Kubernetes 1.31 on EKS. The goal was simple: get traces and metrics from every service into Grafana Tempo and Mimir without changing application code. ...