This is sort of all just a reframing of existing technologies.
Span = an event (which is bascially just a log with an associated trace), and some data fields. Trace = a log for a request with a unique Id.
A useful thing about opentelemetry is that there's auto-instrumentation so you can get this all out-of-the-box for most JVM apps. Of course you could probably log your queries instead, so it's not necessarily a game-changer but a nice-to-have.
Also the standardization is nice.
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