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OpenTelemetry

A vendor-neutral observability framework.

OpenTelemetry provides a single set of APIs, SDKs, and protocols for emitting traces, metrics, and logs from applications. The OpenTelemetry Collector receives data over its OTLP protocol (or Jaeger's, Zipkin's, or Prometheus's), processes it, and exports to any of dozens of supported backends — Jaeger, Zipkin, Tempo, Honeycomb, Datadog, New Relic, and many more.

The project is the merger of the older OpenTracing (Uber, 2015) and OpenCensus (Google, 2018) efforts, formed in 2019 under the CNCF. The size of the merger and the breadth of language SDKs required (Java, Go, Python, Node.js, .NET, Ruby, PHP, C++, Swift, Rust, Erlang) make it one of the largest CNCF projects by contributor count.

OpenTelemetry has effectively become the standard instrumentation API. New tracing and metrics work in cloud- native software targets OTLP first; older protocols are supported for compatibility but are gradually being replaced. The collector itself is increasingly used as a lightweight "observability gateway" that handles routing and processing between application and backend.

The OTel Collector binary:
  wget https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-releases/releases/latest
Or via Docker:
  docker run -p 4318:4318 otel/opentelemetry-collector-contrib:latest