As applications become increasingly distributed, debugging performance issues or locating failures in a Node.js backend can be challenging. Logging by itself usually provides limited context to comprehend how a request navigates through many layers of your system. Similarly, you cannot correlate trace data with application-specific events if you use tracing without structured logging.
That is where OpenTelemetry (OTel) for tracing and Pino for structured logging come in. By combining the two, you get deep observability — blending logs and traces together for an unobstructed view of your system’s behavior, thereby speeding up debugging, monitoring, and root cause analysis.