OpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry is a vendor-neutral standard and set of libraries for generating and exporting metrics, logs and traces, portable across backends.
What is opentelemetry?
OpenTelemetry is a vendor-neutral standard and set of libraries for generating and exporting metrics, logs and traces, portable across backends.
Plain and technical
OpenTelemetry is a common way to produce telemetry from your applications that any monitoring backend can consume, so you are not tied to one vendor instrumentation.
OpenTelemetry defines an API, SDKs for major languages, a wire protocol (OTLP) and a collector for processing and routing telemetry. Its practical significance is decoupling instrumentation from backend: because the instrumentation is standard, changing observability vendor does not require reinstrumenting applications.
What it looks like in practice
Nearby vocabulary
Distributed tracing
Distributed tracing follows one request across every service it touches, recording the duration and outcome of each step so you see where time went.
Observability
Observability is the property of a system that allows its internal state to be understood from the signals it emits, including for failures nobody anticipated.
Cardinality
Cardinality is the number of distinct combinations of label values for a metric, and it is the primary driver of metric storage cost.
How DevOpsArk handles opentelemetry
Articles on this subject
Logs, metrics and traces: which signal answers which question
What each telemetry type is genuinely good at, what it costs, and how to decide where a given piece of information belongs.
What is observability, and how is it different from monitoring?
A definition of observability that does more work than "the three pillars": what property you are actually trying to obtain, and how to tell whether you have it.
More definitions
See these concepts in a running system
A 30-minute walkthrough against your own infrastructure rather than a slide about the theory.