Open Source Summit North America 2025

Context propagation is the cornerstone of observability in distributed systems, but traditional approaches often falter in non-linear workflows like message queues, event-driven architectures, state transitions, or shared resources. Span links powered by OpenTelemetry, bridge this gap by enabling connections between spans across unrelated execution contexts.

This session explores a practical use case where span links augment context propagation in an event-driven microservices system. We'll demonstrate how to track a single user's transaction across services that communicate asynchronously. Using tools like OpenTelemetry and compatible backends, we'll show how span links resolve visibility challenges, uncover hidden latencies, and maintain trace continuity even when the standard parent-child relationships break.