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The OpenTelemetry API and SDK Questions

Practice questions for The OpenTelemetry API and SDK topic in OpenTelemetry Certified Associate. 89 questions covering this domain.

89 questions23 easy42 medium24 hard
Q1
easy

A library author wants to add tracing hooks without forcing every application to pull in SDK dependencies. Which dependency should the library use?

Q2
medium

A developer is initializing tracing for an application. Which statement about `TracerProvider` is correct?

Q3
hard

A shared framework library currently imports an SDK and exporter directly, causing applications to inherit telemetry behavior they did not choose. Wha...

Q4
medium

A team wants to attach metadata describing the entity producing telemetry, such as pod name and namespace, to all spans and metrics from a service. Wh...

Q5
easy

Which component is the factory for Meters in OpenTelemetry metrics?

Q6
medium

An architect needs to associate two traces that are causally related but not in a direct parent-child relationship because work is processed asynchron...

Q7
easy

Which environment variable is recommended to set the logical name of a service explicitly?

Q8
hard

A service uses automatic instrumentation but the team also wants richer business-level telemetry from application code. What does the official instrum...

Q9
easy

What is the default value SDKs assign to `service.name` if it is not explicitly set?

Q10
hard

A team is instrumenting a queued workflow where a producer service emits a job and a consumer service processes it much later. Which combination best ...

Q11
medium

A team wants existing application logs to be correlated automatically with active traces when an SDK or autoinstrumentation is enabled. What informati...

Q12
hard

An organization wants to propagate a user identifier across internal services for correlation, but it also calls third-party APIs on the same request ...

Q13
medium

An SDK user wants to rename a metric, change its aggregation, and reduce which attributes are reported. Which SDK feature is designed for that?

Q14
hard

A developer needs to choose between span attributes and span events for recording extra information. When is a span event the better choice?

Q15
medium

A developer wants to set a custom deployment environment on telemetry without changing application code. Which environment variable can be used for th...

Q16
medium

A developer needs to correlate operations across service boundaries using the default OpenTelemetry propagator. Which header format should they expect...

Q17
medium

A developer wants to record request latency distributions so they can answer questions like how many requests were under one second. Which instrument ...

Q18
easy

Which metric instrument should be used for a value that only ever increases over time?

Q19
easy

A team wants to measure the current number of work items in a queue, which can rise and fall over time. Which instrument is the best fit?

Q20
hard

A team puts `clientId` into baggage and expects it to appear automatically as a span attribute on every downstream span. It does not. Why?

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