Next.js Observability with OpenTelemetry in Production

A practical setup for tracing API latency, server actions, and upstream dependencies in Next.js applications using OpenTelemetry.

Why teams miss incidents

Without distributed traces, teams see symptoms but not causal paths across API routes, databases, and third-party providers.

Minimal instrumentation setup

import { NodeSDK } from "@opentelemetry/sdk-node"
import { getNodeAutoInstrumentations } from "@opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node"
import { OTLPTraceExporter } from "@opentelemetry/exporter-trace-otlp-http"

const sdk = new NodeSDK({
  traceExporter: new OTLPTraceExporter({ url: process.env.OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT }),
  instrumentations: [getNodeAutoInstrumentations()],
})

sdk.start()

Alerting thresholds we recommend

• p95 API latency over 1200ms for 5 minutes
• error rate above 1.5% on checkout and payment flows
• sustained saturation above 75% on critical database pools

Incident triage flow

Final takeaway

Observability is most useful when tied to business-critical journeys, not vanity dashboards.