Why OpenTelemetry?

By using OpenTelemetry SDKs with your application code, you can break free of any kind of proprietary vendor agents in your code. For robust observability, users need custom integrations. If you are using a vendor agent, you run the risk of getting too tightly coupled with the vendor. In case of things like a sudden change in billing practices, you can't migrate quickly.

But if you're using OpenTelemetry, changing vendors can be as simple as changing the configuration for your exporters. You can send your telemetry data to any OpenTelemetry-compatible backends.

OpenTelemetry is built to take care of all your observability needs. It can generate all kinds of telemetry signals - logs, metrics, and traces. Having a single source for all your telemetry needs has advantages like less overhead, consistent data formats across signals, less learning curve, etc.

The biggest advantage of using OpenTelemetry as a single source comes with having access to much better context while troubleshooting that comes with the correlation of signals.

In SigNoz, users can quickly go from application metrics to related logs and traces with data from OpenTelemetry instrumented applications.

Semantic conventions define a common set of attributes that ensure consistent data labeling across different signals - even those produced by different databases, cloud providers, and frameworks. Many engineering teams struggle to work constantly on standardizing data coming from different sources.

Semantic conventions of OpenTelemetry ensure standardized data formats that can integrate and interoperate with various tools.

If you instrument your application with OpenTelemetry SDKs and collect infrastructure metrics from your infra (VMs/containers/k8s env) with OpenTelemetry Collector, you can correlate all signals for more context while troubleshooting.

OpenTelemetry collector is a versatile tool for managing telemetry data efficiently. It acts as the data processing centre for your telemetry data. You can receive and export data in multiple data formats like OTLP, Jaeger, or Prometheus.

The collector also comes bundled with processors to process your telemetry data before exporting it to a backend. You can do useful things like sampling, scrubbing off PII data, etc., with the help of the collector.

Having an open-source standard in your engineering organization helps build up a consistent knowledge base. Training your engineers on an open-source standard has better ROI compared to training engineers on proprietary tools.

You can build upon your knowledge base without worrying about changing the technology. With the increased adoption of OpenTelemetry, you can also expect new engineering hires to be trained in OpenTelemetry already.

The ultimate aim of OpenTelemetry is to have "built-in" telemetry where software emits high-quality, ubiquitous, rich telemetry without developers having to do anything. Many high-profile open-source software have already incorporated OpenTelemetry-compatible telemetry data by default.

For example, Apache Airflow has integrated support for OpenTelemetry metrics and traces. Similarly, popular authors of popular Python frameworks like Falcon are discussing introducing support for built-in telemetry data generated by OpenTelemetry.

New-age developer tools like Tracetest are being built on OpenTelemetry for critical developer workflows like testing. Having standard telemetry data will lead to an open ecosystem for innovation where more tooling will come out to build resilient applications.

If you are using OpenTelemetry for your applications, you can easily send data to any of these tools with some minor configurations.

OpenTelemetry enables application owners to have context-rich, consistent telemetry data from their applications and infrastructure. By using OpenTelemetry, you can future-proof your data layer by not changing technology while changing observability vendors.

With its adoption in popular open-source libraries as the choice of built-in telemetry, you are also future-proofing your observability stack. Whether you are starting out or using something already, now is the right time to start using OpenTelemetry.