OTLP
also: OpenTelemetry Protocol
OTLP (OpenTelemetry Protocol) is a vendor-neutral standard protocol for transmitting telemetry data (traces, metrics, and logs) from applications to observability backends.
OTLP is an open specification developed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) that defines how applications send observability signals to monitoring systems. It eliminates the need for proprietary protocols by providing a standardized way to export traces, metrics, and logs from your applications.
OTLP supports multiple transport mechanisms, including gRPC (binary, efficient) and HTTP/JSON (human-readable, easier to debug). For example, a containerized application instrumented with OpenTelemetry libraries can send trace data via OTLP to a backend like Jaeger, Datadog, or Grafana Loki without vendor lock-in.
In Linux environments, OTLP is particularly useful for observability in cloud-native deployments, microservices architectures, and containerized workloads where distributed tracing and centralized logging are essential for understanding system behavior.