OpenTelemetry

About OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry (also referred to as OTel) is an open-source project to provide observability to software. The project initially emerged as a tracing instrumentation project but merged and evolved to incorporate metrics and logs within the platform. As a result of this, while tracing support is well established for most languages, metric and log support are limited both in comparison to traces and to the capabilities of other tools.

Comparisons to alternatives

OTel comprises of multiple components, including the SDK's for adding telemetry and observability to applications as well as the protocol for transferring and manipulating that data in transit to its ultimate point of analysis. Because of the breadth of the project, there are multiple areas where it can be compared to other products and projects in the market.

Comparisons to other CNCF projects

Comparisons to other APM tooling