OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is the CNCF standard for instrumenting applications to produce telemetry: traces, metrics, and logs. It defines an open specification, language SDKs, a vendor-neutral collector, and wire protocols so applications can be instrumented once and the data can be sent to any compatible backend.

What it covers

• API and SDK. Per-language libraries for creating spans, recording metrics, and emitting logs.
• Instrumentation libraries. Drop-in integrations for popular HTTP servers, database drivers, message clients, and frameworks.
• Collector. A standalone service that receives, processes, filters, and exports telemetry, decoupling apps from backends.
• OTLP. The Open Telemetry Protocol, the standard wire format (gRPC or HTTP+protobuf) for shipping telemetry.
• Semantic conventions. Standardized attribute names so the same data is labelled the same way across vendors.

Why it matters

Before OpenTelemetry, every observability vendor had its own SDK and agent. OTel consolidates them into one open standard, which means swapping backends or running multiple at once does not require re-instrumenting the application.

Backends that consume OTLP

• Jaeger, Tempo, Prometheus, Loki, Datadog, Honeycomb, New Relic, Splunk, Dynatrace, Grafana Cloud, Azure Monitor, Google Cloud Operations