Noa Levi's session from Monitorama PDX 2024. Strava implemented distributed tracing over 4 years ago, yet the tool has been historically underutilized. We’ve improved documentation, presented tech talks, and created training modules to increase the adoption of the tool, yet there was little to no change in tracing usage. Though underutilized, we’ve chosen to continue using and investing in improving our distributed tracing tooling given how impactful the tool is to those that do use it. This talk will explain how we inadvertently increased adoption and improved our distributed tracing tooling while migrating from OpenTracing to OpenTelemetry. The migration involved updating configuration, redeploying, and testing over 100 microservices. Strava’s platform team did not have the context to safely deploy and test those services, so that work was assigned out to each team at Strava. Practically what this meant was that every team ended up poking around our trace visualization tooling, many of them for the first time. Engineers were able to learn about tracing within the context of a service they were familiar with. Almost immediately, we noticed more engineers using the tooling and even making suggestions for improvements to enhance their data. While our intention of asking teams to migrate their own services was to prevent production downtime, there was a happy accident of increasing adoption.