This paper presents a practical architecture for integrating OpenTelemetry distributed tracing into a production embedded Linux Smart TV platform, addressing the unique constraints of resource-limited consumer devices. We introduce libetv-tracing, a thin C++ wrapper around the OpenTelemetry C++ SDK with embedded-appropriate defaults, describe a W3C Trace Context propagation strategy across MessagePack-based IPC boundaries, and present an end-to-end observability pipeline combining Fluent Bit, OTLP/gRPC, and Grafana Tempo for unified trace, log, and metric correlation. The system delivers end-to-end traceability across application launch, media playback, and platform service interactions, materially improving root cause analysis speed and reducing mean time to resolve (MTTR) for platform-level incidents.
Ammar Yasir Ali (Mon,) studied this question.