---
title: "Enhance Your API Monitoring with Zuplo’s OpenTelemetry Plugin"
description: "Announcing the release of our OpenTelemetry plugin, created to help you collect and export telemetry data from your Zuplo API efficiently. It implements tracing"
canonicalUrl: "https://zuplo.com/blog/2024/05/20/enhance-your-api-monitoring-with-zuplo-opentelemetry-plugin"
pageType: "blog"
date: "2024-05-20"
authors: "adrian"
tags: "API Monitoring"
image: "https://zuplo.com/og?text=New%20OpenTelemetry%20Plugin"
---
We're excited to announce the release of our OpenTelemetry plugin, designed to
help you collect and export telemetry data from your Zuplo API efficiently.
Currently, the OpenTelemetry plugin implements tracing, with metrics and logging
support planned for future releases.

![OpenTelemetry gif](/media/gif/opentelemetry.gif)

## Tracing with OpenTelemetry

Tracing is a powerful tool for monitoring performance, identifying bottlenecks,
and troubleshooting issues in your API. The OpenTelemetry plugin automatically
instructs your API to collect trace data, which can be sent to any
OpenTelemetry-compliant service such as Honeycomb, Dynatrace, Jaeger, and more.

When tracing is enabled on your API, you will gain insights into the timings for
each request and spans for plugins, handlers, and policies. The plugin also
supports trace propagation using W3C headers by default, allowing you to trace
requests from the client all the way to your backend.

## Trace Visualization

The OpenTelemetry plugin traces the following by default:

- **Request**: The entire request lifecycle, including the time taken to process
  and respond.

- **Inbound Policies:** The execution time for all inbound policies and each
  individual policy.

- **Handler**: The request handler’s execution time.

- **Outbound Policies**: The execution time for all outbound policies and each
  individual policy.

- **Subrequests**: Any use of fetch within custom policies or handlers.

With Zuplo’s OpenTelemetry plugin, you can significantly enhance your API
monitoring capabilities. Start tracing your API requests today and gain deep
insights into your system’s performance and behavior. The OpenTelemetry Plugin
is available with a
[Zuplo Enterprise plan](https://zuplo.com/meeting?utm_source=blog). Check out
[our docs for a step-by-step](https://zuplo.com/docs/articles/opentelemetry) on
how to get started.