OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry is an open source framework for collecting telemetry from software. It gives developers one set of APIs, SDKs and tools for traces, metrics and logs, and it is a vendor-neutral standard.

OpenTelemetry lets you instrument your code once and send the data to any compatible backend. It includes libraries for many languages, automatic instrumentation for common frameworks and a collector that can process and route data before it is stored. Context passes along with requests, so traces, metrics and logs can be linked across services.

• One set of APIs and SDKs for traces, metrics and logs
• Automatic instrumentation for popular frameworks
• A collector to process, filter and route telemetry
• Export to many backends, including Jaeger and Prometheus
• Context propagation across service boundaries

OpenTelemetry suits backend developers, platform engineers and observability teams who want to avoid being tied to one vendor. It is also a good base for teams that already use several monitoring tools and need a common way to collect data.

OpenTelemetry is free to use and licensed under Apache 2.0. It does not store telemetry itself, so you choose a backend, which can be self-hosted or commercial. The project is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project, and its specification is maintained on GitHub.