Distributed tracing is essential in understanding complex systems, but it can miss latency issue details. By combining profiling techniques with distributed tracing, Elastic provides the inferred spans feature as an extension for the OTel Java SDK.

Frustrated by slow traces but unsure where the code bottleneck lies? Elastic Universal Profiling correlates profiling stacktraces with OpenTelemetry (OTel) traces, helping you identify and pinpoint the exact lines of code causing performance issues.

The instrumentation approach in OpenTelemetry's Java Agent comes with some limitations with respect to maintenance and testability. Elastic contributes an invokedynamic-based instrumentation approach that helps overcoming these limitations.