The open-source vendor-neutral standard for emitting traces, metrics, and logs, the way most modern observability tools take input.
OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a CNCF project that defines a vendor-neutral specification, SDK, and protocol for collecting traces, metrics, and logs from applications. By instrumenting once with OTel, a team can ship telemetry to any compliant backend, Datadog, Honeycomb, Grafana Cloud, Nova, without rewriting code. OTel is now the default instrumentation choice for new services because it removes vendor lock-in at the source.
Before OTel, switching observability vendors meant re-instrumenting every service, a multi-quarter project. OTel makes the data-emission layer portable, which means the vendor competition shifts to where it should be: query speed, AI features, alert quality, price, instead of who installed first.
See the part of the platform that handles opentelemetry in production.