Configuring the tracing pipeline

With the packages now installed, we're ready to take our first step to generate distributed traces with OpenTelemetry – configuring the tracing pipeline. The tracing pipeline is what allows the tracing data we explored in Chapter 2, OpenTelemetry Signals – Traces, Metrics, and Logs, to be generated when the OpenTelemetry API calls are made. The pipeline also defines where and how the data will be emitted. Without a tracing pipeline, a no-op implementation is used by the API, meaning the code will not generate distributed traces. The tracing pipeline configures the following:

• TracerProvider to determine how spans should be generated
• A Resource object, which identifies the source of the spans
• SpanProcessor to describe how spans will be exported
• SpanExporter to describe where the spans will be exported

The following code imports the TracerProvider, ConsoleSpanExporter, and SimpleSpanProcessor classes from the...