How do you troubleshoot missing spans from an OpenTelemetry-instrumented service?

First confirm the receiving side is actually configured to accept OTLP: check that the Agent's OTLP receiver (or the Collector's Datadog exporter) is enabled on the expected port and protocol (gRPC vs HTTP), since a protocol or port mismatch between the SDK's exporter config and the receiver is one of the most common silent failure points.

Check the OpenTelemetry SDK's own export configuration for batching and shutdown behavior - if the application exits (or is killed) before the SDK's batch span processor flushes its buffer, in-flight spans can be lost with no error surfaced anywhere, which looks identical to spans never having been created at all.

Verify network connectivity along the actual path from the application to wherever it's exporting - directly to the Agent, or to an intermediate Collector - since spans failing to export due to a network or firewall issue typically fail quietly from the application's perspective unless export errors are explicitly logged.

Check for missing or malformed resource attributes, especially service.name - Datadog's mapping from OpenTelemetry's semantic conventions to its own service/tagging model depends on these being present and well-formed, and spans with missing critical attributes can be dropped or mis-tagged during translation rather than simply appearing under an unexpected service name.

Finally, rule out sampling: confirm what sampling configuration is active in the OpenTelemetry SDK itself (a head-based sampler could be dropping spans well before they ever reach the exporter), since that's a separate layer from anything configured on the Datadog side.

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