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LocalStack lets you run SQS, Lambda, and S3 locally in Docker — but there's a hidden trap: OpenTelemetry's default AWS propagator doesn't work with free LocalStack. Here's how to set up end-to-end local testing with working trace propagation.

SQS doesn't propagate trace context automatically. You instrument both sides, deploy, and get two disconnected traces. This post shows how to wire them into one waterfall — and the ESM format gotcha that silently breaks it every time.

OpenTelemetry's GenAI instrumentation gives you spans and token counts. It does not give you conversations, workflow cost rollups, or prompts visible in your dashboard. last9-genai is an OTel extension that fills those three gaps — without replacing your existing observability stack.

Health check endpoints generate thousands of identical, useless spans per day. Here are two production-ready approaches to filter them from your Python OTel traces — and the correctness trap most implementations miss.

Argo Rollouts exposes Prometheus metrics on port 8090 — but the docs lie about which labels exist. Here's how to scrape them into Last9, build a canary dashboard, and use Last9 as an automated AnalysisTemplate gate, including the auth and base64 gotchas.

It's 2:47 AM. PagerDuty fires. You open a Slack alert and see: p99 latency spike on checkout-service. You SSH into the host, check dashboards in four tabs, grep logs for the last 20 minutes, and eventually find a slow query introduced in a deploy six hours ago. It took 34 minutes. You resolved it, w

> Standard OTel .NET instrumentation captures headers, status codes, and timing — not request or response bodies. Here's how to add body capture to your traces while keeping PHI out of your observability backend.

GCP's load balancer silently rewrites your traceparent header, orphaning spans in any OTLP backend. Here's the custom propagator that fixes it.