Incident Overview
A fictional retail platform sends traces from its services to a single OpenTelemetry Collector gateway, which forwards them to a tracing backend. Since mid-morning, engineers report that traces for the checkout service are incomplete.
Some requests have no trace at all. The checkout team insists the application is healthy and that its error rate has not changed.
The Collector process is running and its container has not restarted.
Investigation Options
Review the available operational moves and select the best immediate action.
Collect the Collector's logs and internal refusal and export metrics read-only, and compare the limit with the container ceiling
Restart the backend tracing service to clear a suspected slow ingest
Remove memory_limiter from the pipeline in production so data is never refused
Ask the checkout team to disable tracing until the cause is known