OpenTelemetry (OTel)

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is an open source observability framework from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It provides vendor-neutral APIs, SDKs, a wire protocol and a Collector for generating, processing and exporting telemetry: traces, metrics and logs. You instrument code once and send the data to any compatible backend.

How it works

Applications use the OTel API to create spans and record metrics, either by hand or through automatic instrumentation libraries for common frameworks. The SDK batches the data and exports it over the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP), by default on port 4317 for gRPC and 4318 for HTTP. Semantic conventions fix attribute names such as http.request.method and service.name, so data from a Go service and a Java service lines up. An OpenTelemetry Collector often sits between apps and backends to process and route the data.

Why it matters in production

Before OTel, changing an observability vendor meant re-instrumenting every service. A single standard keeps instrumentation stable while backends change, and it gives every team the same names for the same things.

See also

• OpenTelemetry Collector

• Distributed tracing

• Observability

• GenAI semantic conventions

• Trace sampling

On the One2N blog

• A pragmatic guide to get started with OpenTelemetry

• Building observable Go APIs with OpenTelemetry & Prometheus

• How to instrument a RAG pipeline with OpenTelemetry

References

1. Origin of the term

2. What is OpenTelemetry? (official documentation)

3. OpenTelemetry specification