OpenTelemetry
In depthMonitoring
Also known as: OTel
Vendor-neutral standard for collecting traces, metrics and logs from applications.
OpenTelemetry, explained
Written by EduVerseWhat it is
OpenTelemetry (OTel) is an open-source standard, with APIs, SDKs and a Collector, for producing traces, metrics and logs from your code. It isn’t a dashboard or a database: it’s the layer that creates telemetry data and ships it to whatever backend you choose.
Why teams use it
Before OTel, every monitoring vendor had its own agent and data format, so switching vendors meant instrumenting everything again. With OpenTelemetry you instrument once and send the data to Jaeger, Prometheus, Datadog or another backend. Many languages also have automatic instrumentation for common frameworks, so you get useful traces without writing much code.
An example from work
You add the OpenTelemetry Java agent to a Spring Boot service and deploy it, but in the tracing UI it shows up as unknown_service:java. The fix is setting the environment variable OTEL_SERVICE_NAME, while OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT points the agent at your team’s Collector.
Our own explanation, not a quote from the book.
In the book
Sentences from The Software Realm, Decoded that mention OpenTelemetry, exactly as printed.
3 more passages about OpenTelemetry in the full book
Read every conversation where OpenTelemetry comes up, with the interactive slides and demos.
Where it fits
Instrumenting applications for observability
Coverage in the book
Covered in depth: multiple pages with explanations, examples and simulations.
