With the industry-wide shift from monoliths to microservice architectures, runtime interdependencies moved to the network layer. To understand execution paths and find architectural flaws and bottlenecks, distributed tracing is the tool of choice. And much has happened in this space over the last few months (e.g., OpenTracing and OpenCensus have merged into one project, and a new w3c standard for trace context propagation has been released).With these new developments, you may wonder where you should start to implement monitoring? In this talk, we’ll get you up to speed, starting with the basic concepts and challenges of distributed tracing, and then move to a more detailed introduction of Open Telemetry. We’ll cover the architecture and building blocks, review where the project is now, and share with you how we think you can leverage open-source tools to start monitoring your applications today.