OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is the CNCF-standard way to collect traces, metrics, and logs with vendor-neutral APIs and SDKs. Instrument once, export to your backend of choice (Prometheus, Jaeger, vendor SaaS, etc.) instead of locking into a proprietary agent. For new services and platforms we treat OTel as the default observability foundation, it is what makes Incident Management detection and Up-time Monitoring actually work in modern, ephemeral infrastructure.

Blurb

High-quality, ubiquitous, and portable telemetry to enable effective observability.

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.