OpenTelemetry: Standards for observability
When one company acquires another, for example, two different sets of incompatible observability tools might need to be maintained indefinitely.
The resulting environment could be unwieldy, requiring skilled developers and SMEs to understand and manage it. In addition, the proprietary nature of each vendor’s observability tools has often resulted in vendor lock-in, making it difficult and impractical to switch from one vendor to another for more functional tools or more attractive prices.
In response to these issues, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) created OpenTelemetry, a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) and software development kits (SDKs), and tools that applies standards to observability. OpenTelemetry-compliant tools are used to instrument, generate, collect, and export the telemetry data of metrics, events, logs, and traces.
OpenTelemetry is the standard by which application code is instrumented to produce MELT (metrics, events, logs, and traces) signals to help make the app observable.
OpenTelemetry-compliant tools overcome these interoperability challenges. More specifically, they can forward data to a variety of analysis tools and integrate with popular libraries and frameworks. The result is broader and richer analysis of software behavior and performance.
In addition, tools that are compliant with the OpenTelemetry standard afford a high degree of flexibility in instrumentation, the instructions in an application that report data about it.
Compliant tools can support code-based instrumentation, where a proprietary instrumentation protocol is used. However, compliant tools can also support zero-code instrumentation, by calling on a set of libraries that enables automatic instrumentation. The zero-code capability is especially valuable for applications that have not yet been instrumented.
The free, open source OpenTelemetry standards are earning broad industry support. Approximately 75 vendors now implement OpenTelemetry standards in their products.
