[2026] OpenTelemetry for LLM Observability — Self-Hosted Setup

I've been running a small AI automation shop — just me, a handful of agents, and a self-hosted stack that needs to stay observable without blowing the budget. When I started instrumenting my LLM pipelines, I found that most observability guides assumed you'd use a managed platform. But if you're like me and prefer to own your data and infrastructure, OpenTelemetry gives you a solid, vendor-neutral foundation. Here's what I've learned getting OpenTelemetry working for LLM agent traces on a self-...