Four silent mistakes that break OpenTelemetry trace trees in Go

A Go developer has documented four common but hard-to-detect errors that prevent OpenTelemetry distributed traces from forming correctly. Unlike logs and metrics, traces capture the full structure of how code executes, allowing engineers to answer unanticipated questions about system behavior after the fact. The failures outlined include initializing a tracer before the provider is set up, mishandling context propagation across process boundaries, attaching spans to the wrong parent context, and neglecting to end spans so they are never exported. Each mistake produces no error or warning, making them particularly difficult to diagnose. The author emphasizes that correct parent-child span relationships depend entirely on passing the right Go context.Context to each span's Start call.