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In modern distributed systems, monitoring and observability are critical for ensuring application performance, reliability, and debugging. OpenTelemetry (OTel) has emerged as the leading open-source observability framework, providing a unified standard for tracing, metrics, and logs.
What is OpenTelemetry?
OpenTelemetry is a vendor-neutral, open-source observability framework that allows developers to instrument, collect, and export telemetry data from applications. It helps monitor application behavior by gathering logs, metrics, and traces, making debugging and performance tuning easier.
Key Features of OpenTelemetry
- Unified Observability: Supports tracing, metrics, and logs under a single framework.
- Language Agnostic: Supports multiple programming languages like Java, Python, Go, .NET, and more.
- Extensible and Pluggable: Integrates with different observability backends like Prometheus, Jaeger, Zipkin, and OpenSearch.
- Cloud-Native Ready: Designed for microservices and cloud-based applications.
- Standardized Instrumentation: Follows industry standards such as W3C Trace Context and OpenMetrics.
OpenTelemetry Architecture
OpenTelemetry consists of several key components:
- APIs & SDKs: Language-specific libraries for instrumenting applications.
