Comment by nijave

You can usually turn logging on but a lot of the OTEL stack defaults to best effort and silently drops data.

We had Grafana Agent running which was wrapping the reference implementation OTEL collector written in go and it was pretty easy to see when data was being dropped via logs.

I think some limitation is also on the storage backend. We were using Grafana Cloud Tempo which imposes limits. I'd think using a backend that doesn't enforce recency would help.

With the OTEL collector I'd think you could utilize some processors/connectors or write your own to handle individual spans that get too big. Not sure on backends but my current company uses Datadog and their proprietary solution handles >30k spans per trace pretty easily.

I think the biggest issue is the low cohesion, high DIY nature of OTEL. You can build powerful solutions but you really need to get low level and assemble everything yourself tuning timeouts, limits, etc for your use case.