OpenTelemetry
also: OTel, OTEL
OpenTelemetry is an open-source framework for collecting, processing, and exporting observability data (metrics, logs, and traces) from applications and infrastructure. It provides standardized APIs and instrumentation libraries to help developers monitor system behavior and diagnose performance issues.
OpenTelemetry (often abbreviated as OTel) is a vendor-neutral standard for observability that allows you to instrument your applications once and send telemetry data to multiple backends. It unifies three pillars of observability: metrics (numerical measurements over time), traces (request flows through distributed systems), and logs (discrete events and messages).
The framework consists of APIs, SDKs, and auto-instrumentation tools across multiple programming languages. For example, you can use the OpenTelemetry Python SDK to automatically capture HTTP request spans in your Flask application, then export them to Jaeger for distributed tracing or Prometheus for metrics collection.
A key advantage is avoiding vendor lock-in: you instrument your code with OpenTelemetry APIs once, and can switch backends (Datadog, New Relic, Grafana Loki, etc.) by simply changing exporters without modifying application code.