In opentelemetry, there is something called as span and trace.
-
Basically think of one http request. The whole lifetime of request and response can be called
trace. And things done along the way is calledspan. Lets say when request comes, and we want to create some file or read something for that request that will be onespan. And so on. That is how we know the whole lifetime of request. -
Now when we collect the data we might want to send it to external system to display for that we want what we call as
exporters.