OpenTelemetry

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First Added:December 8, 2025 Updated: July 2, 2026

OpenTelemetry. (OTel) is the CNCF-standard way to collect traces, metrics, and logs with vendor-neutral APIs and SDKs.

Summary

OTel defines semantic conventions, context propagation, and collectors so telemetry is consistent across languages and runtimes. Most teams start with auto-instrumentation or lightweight SDK hooks, run the OpenTelemetry Collector for routing and redaction, then wire exporters to existing analysis tools.

Details

  • Signals: traces (distributed requests), metrics (aggregates), logs (events), often correlated via shared trace context.
  • Neutrality: avoids the “three proprietary agents” problem; switching vendors should not require re-instrumenting applications.
  • Collector: optional pipeline for batching, sampling, PII scrubbing, and fan-out to multiple backends.
  • Maturity: widely supported in Kubernetes workloads, GoLang, Java, .NET, Python, and major cloud APM products.