메시 관측성에서 '0+0=2'처럼 데이터가 왜곡되는 문제를 해결하는 실용 가이드

Posted on August 11, 2026 by Israel Blancas, Software Engineer at Coralogix and Jose Gomez-Selles, Product Lead at VictoriaMetrics A Service Mesh like Istio , together with Kiali gives you a lot on day one. You install the mesh, point Prometheus at it, and suddenly you have request rate, latency, error rate, and a fairly good picture of service-to-service traffic. You get this visibility into the applications without touching their code, which is often enough to answer the first round of questions during an incident.

Since you also heard that OpenTelemetry is the new standard and zero-code instrumentation will avoid the burden of polluting all your code, you go all-in for it. This happy-path is covered by every tutorial and, sure, it works. The bit that actually comes for your weekend is not being able to connect the dots. When you open your tracing UI, you can see how your traces fall apart and the spans that should be together don’t seem to be part of the same transaction. Your traces are broken now. And this is frustrating because you were trying to put together several pieces that work great on their own.

After grinding the CNCF ecosystem by installing Istio, Prometheus, logs, instrumentation in the applications and third parties, you still ended up without having a coherent picture. The request is there, the spans are there but… something doesn’t add up because, in distributed systems, every request has its own story and it is actually quite sad that, after all this effort, the point is missed. But let’s not lose faith (yet). Actually, now is when real OpenTelemetry comes to help.

Throughout the following lines, we will show how, with a few tweaks, OpenTelemetry provides a clean way to connect all the pieces: application instrumentation, context propagation, and, most importantly, a Collector that can ingest telemetry from both the application and the mesh in different formats. To illustrate this problem (and how to solve it), let’s imagine the following setup: In this post, we will help readers to fix this integration problem by making the mesh and the applications automatic instrumentation contribute to the same trace. Spoiler alert: The interesting part is not that traces break.