OpenTelemetry Project Publishes "Demystifying OpenTelemetry" Guide to Broaden Observability Adoption

"OpenTelemetry is becoming a common standard for collecting logs, metrics, traces, and other telemetry from applications and infrastructure, yet its flexibility and rising ecosystem have also led to confusion about how it works and when to use specific components. The new guide seeks to address frequently asked questions around the project's purpose, its relationship to monitoring and observability platforms, and how it integrates with cloud providers and APM tools."

"At a high level, the guide emphasizes that OpenTelemetry is not a full observability product but rather a vendor-neutral instrumentation standard and collection framework. It captures telemetry data in a consistent format and exports it to backend systems for storage, analysis, and visualization. The blog explains the roles of the OpenTelemetry API, SDKs, collectors, and protocols such as OTLP, illustrating how these pieces fit into an end-to-end observability pipeline, from in-app instrumentation to backend consumption."

OpenTelemetry is becoming a common standard for collecting logs, metrics, traces, and other telemetry from applications and infrastructure. Its flexibility and growing ecosystem have created confusion about component roles and appropriate usage in observability stacks. The project clarifies the distinction between instrumentation and backend observability products and explains the roles of API, SDKs, collectors, and protocols such as OTLP. OpenTelemetry provides vendor-neutral instrumentation and a collection framework that captures telemetry consistently and exports it to backend systems for storage, analysis, and visualization. Teams still require backend systems like Prometheus, Jaeger, Grafana, or Splunk to store, query, alert, and visualize telemetry data. The community aims to reduce adoption barriers and enable consistent instrumentation across distributed systems.

Read at InfoQ