OpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a vendor-neutral, open-source observability framework and set of APIs, SDKs, and tools for generating, collecting, and exporting metrics, logs, and distributed traces from applications.
Definition
OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a vendor-neutral, open-source observability framework and set of APIs, SDKs, and tools for generating, collecting, and exporting metrics, logs, and distributed traces from applications.
Overview
OpenTelemetry emerged from the merger of two earlier observability projects, OpenTracing and OpenCensus, under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, with the goal of giving developers a single, standardized way to instrument code regardless of which backend observability vendor they use. Instead of locking an application into a proprietary agent, teams instrument their code once with OpenTelemetry's APIs and can then export the resulting telemetry to any compatible backend, such as Prometheus, Jaeger, Grafana or a commercial APM tool like Dynatrace or New Relic. At its core, OpenTelemetry standardizes three telemetry signals — traces (the path a request takes through a distributed system), metrics (numeric measurements over time), and logs — through a common data model and the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) for transmitting that data. Applications are instrumented using language-specific SDKs (available for most major languages) that can be paired with the OpenTelemetry Collector, a standalone process that receives, processes, and routes telemetry data before it reaches a backend. Because distributed, microservice-based systems running on platforms like Kubernetes make it hard to trace a single request across dozens of services, OpenTelemetry has become the default instrumentation layer for modern observability stacks, letting teams avoid vendor lock-in while still getting rich, correlated visibility into their systems.
Key Features
- Vendor-neutral APIs and SDKs for traces, metrics, and logs across many languages
- OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) for standardized telemetry transmission
- Collector component for receiving, processing, and routing telemetry data
- Auto-instrumentation libraries that reduce manual code changes
- Compatibility with most major observability and APM backends
- Governed as a CNCF project with broad industry backing
- Correlated tracing, metrics, and logging for full request visibility