I'm literally porting some code to Otel now and here is what I landed on, even before this article: It is confusing because it's a topic that uses vague terminology that means different things in different domains. For example, I'm looking at one OTel ui and "Traces" are the individual http requests to a service. In another UI, against the same data, "Traces" are the log messages from code in the service, and "Requests" are the individual http requests. To wire up in code, there's yet other terminology.

I haven't decided exactly what to blame for this. In some ways, it's necessary to have vague, inconsistent terminology to cover various use cases. And, to be fair some of the UIs predate OTel.