Leveling Up My MERN Stack Observability with SigNoz

Short summary

A developer walks through self-hosting SigNoz and instrumenting a MERN stack app with OpenTelemetry. Distributed tracing replaces console.log guessing by visualizing each request as a flame graph, revealing database query latency, middleware overhead, and error points. Written as part of a SigNoz pre-event blog challenge.

• •Self-host SigNoz via docker-compose and wire Express with OpenTelemetry OTLP exporter
• •Distributed tracing visualizes per-request flame graphs showing DB query and middleware latency
• •Error pinpointing captures exact failure points without hunting through terminal logs

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