Standardize propagators and header forwarding across all your services before chasing missing spans. Never put timestamps, UUIDs, or other unbounded values in span attributes; they explode cardinality and storage. Keep span attributes under about twenty per span and move the fine detail to structured logs linked by trace id.

Context: An OTel operations guide documents two production traps. Missing context propagation across services is fixed by ensuring every service uses compatible propagators and that traceparent and tracestate headers are forwarded on all HTTP calls. High cardinality warnings come from unbounded attributes like timestamps or UUIDs in attribute values: the fix is structured logging for detail instead of trace attributes, keeping traces to request flow rather than every variable.