What is OpenTelemetry?

OpenTelemetry gives applications one common way to produce telemetry, regardless of language, infrastructure or runtime. It covers three signals: traces, metrics and logs. The project sits in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and was formed by merging two earlier efforts, OpenTracing and OpenCensus, which had both tried to solve the lack of a standard for instrumentation.

The page lists several components. The API defines how code creates telemetry without tying it to a particular implementation. The SDK is the language-specific implementation that handles exporting data. The Collector is a standalone proxy that receives, processes and forwards telemetry to one or more destinations. OTLP, the OpenTelemetry Protocol, is the standard wire format for sending the data. The project also provides a specification, semantic conventions for consistent naming, and automatic instrumentation for common libraries.

Vendor neutrality is a central point. Telemetry can go to many backends, open source or commercial, and users keep ownership of their data and learn a single set of APIs and conventions.

One limit the page states plainly: OpenTelemetry is not a storage system or a visualization tool. Those roles belong to separate backend and frontend products that receive the data it produces.