Practice · OpenTelemetry
What is OpenTelemetry?
OpenTelemetry is the open, vendor-neutral CNCF standard for generating and collecting telemetry: traces, metrics, and logs. You instrument once with its SDKs and the OpenTelemetry Collector, then send the data to any compatible backend, so switching tools never means re-instrumenting your code.
How to get started with OpenTelemetry
- 1 Add the OpenTelemetry SDK or zero-code auto-instrumentation for your language.
- 2 Run the OpenTelemetry Collector as an agent or gateway to receive, process, and export data.
- 3 Export over OTLP to any compatible backend, open source or commercial.
- 4 Adopt the semantic conventions so attributes like service.name mean the same thing everywhere.
The common mistake
What is the most common mistake with OpenTelemetry?
Instrumenting with a vendor-specific SDK and then needing to re-instrument everything to switch tools.