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Build incident timelines with OpenTelemetry entity events without guessing the cause

How to connect infrastructure changes, traces, logs, and metrics so you can explain what happened, when it happened, and which evidence supports it.

A practical guide to reconstructing incidents with OpenTelemetry entity events, request context, traces, logs, and Prometheus without relying on human memory or disconnected dashboards.

Created: August 15, 2026

Published: August 15, 2026

Estimated time40 min
LevelIntermediate
Before you startRead access to Prometheus or Grafana for SLO and error metrics
PlatformsLinux / Docker
WhatsAppXLinkedIn

Linux

Reconstruction from a workstation with kubectl, curl, promtool, and access to observability backends.

kubectlcurljqpromtoolGrafana/Prometheus access
Check rollout history
kubectl -n shop rollout history deploy/checkout-api
Query error-rate metrics
curl -G 'http://prometheus:9090/api/v1/query' --data-urlencode 'query=sum(rate(http_server_requests_seconds_count{service_name="checkout-api",status=~"5.."}[5m]))' | jq
Search logs with trace_id
logcli query --since=2h '{service_name="checkout-api"} |= "trace_id" |= "payment timeout"'

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