OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework that provides a unified set of APIs, libraries, agents, and collectors for capturing distributed traces, metrics, and logs from cloud-native applications. It aims to simplify instrumentation and enable interoperable telemetry pipelines across services and environments. The project emerged from the merger of OpenTracing and OpenCensus and is hosted under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It uses the Apache 2.0 license.

Core components include language-specific APIs and SDKs for instrumenting code, automatic and manual instrumentation libraries, and the OpenTelemetry Collector, a vendor-agnostic agent that ingests telemetry data, applies processing and sampling, and exports to backends. Telemetry is transported primarily via the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP), though other formats are supported. The project defines semantic conventions to standardize attributes, and supports context propagation using standards such as W3C Trace Context and Baggage, with optional B3 compatibility. Instrumentation is available for Java, Go, Python, JavaScript, .NET, C++, and other languages, and can be extended by users.

OpenTelemetry is widely adopted in cloud-native ecosystems as a vendor-agnostic standard for collecting traces, metrics, and logs. It enables exporting to multiple backends, reducing vendor lock-in and enabling integrated observability pipelines. Governance is overseen by the CNCF, with a Technical Steering Committee and community teams guiding API stability and feature development.