OTel Community Day North America 2024

Debugging problems in a distributed system can be hard. Finding the root cause of the problem and assigning the work to a specific team after a test failure can be challenging and time-consuming. Front-end and API tests tell you there is a problem, but not the root cause or which team is responsible. Imagine if you could see exactly what happened, step-by-step, during an end-to-end test by combining your favorite end-to-end testing tool, Cypress or Playwright, with distributed traces. You would gain visibility across your entire distributed system, including both the front end and back end. With this added observability as a part of every end to end test, you no longer have to guess what occurred, what the cause of an error is, or struggle to find the team that can correct the issue. I will present how to use distributed traces to visualize a defined code path and use it as part of a Playwright end-to-end test.