OpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry (Otel) is a collection of open-source tools, APIs, and SDKs that standardize how applications and infrastructure generate, collect, and export telemetry data (traces, metrics, and logs). It provides a unified, vendor-agnostic framework for instrumenting software to enable…
Key facts
- First appeared
- 2019
- Category
- cloud_infrastructure
- Problem solved
- OpenTelemetry was created to solve the problem of fragmented observability tooling and vendor lock-in within cloud-native environments. Before its creation, developers often had to choose between disparate projects for collecting different types of telemetry data (e.g., OpenTracing for traces, OpenCensus for traces/metrics) or rely on proprietary vendor agents, leading to complex instrumentation, limited data portability, and siloed observability insights.
- Platforms
- Serverless environments, Mobile platforms, Web browsers (via Web SDKs), Docker, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, macOS, Windows, Linux, Kubernetes
Related technologies
Notable users
- Microsoft
- Uber Technologies
- Splunk
- Datadog
- Grafana Labs
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- New Relic