OpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry (often shortened to OTel) is an open-source instrumentation standard for applications, hosted by the CNCF, that defines a uniform API and SDK to collect logs, metrics and traces, independently of the obser…
OpenTelemetry (often shortened to OTel) is an open-source instrumentation standard for applications, hosted by the CNCF, that defines a uniform API and SDK to collect logs, metrics and traces, independently of the observability vendor used downstream.
The idea is to decouple instrumentation (which you don't have to redo if you switch tools) from the analysis backend (Datadog, Grafana, Honeycomb, New Relic…). A central collector receives signals from every application and routes them to one or several destinations.
OpenTelemetry is, in 2026, the uncontested standard for cloud-native instrumentation, supported natively by every major framework and APM vendor.