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OpenTelemetry (OTel)

  • https://github.com/open-telemetry
  • Facilitate the generation, export, collection and management of telemetry data (instrumentation)
  • It's not a observability backend (storage) or frontend(visualization)
  • Avoids vendor lock-in

OTEL

Metrics

  • Collects application and system metrics and can export them to backends like:
  • Prometheus: For scraping and storing metrics.
  • Grafana Cloud: For visualization.

Logs

  • Gathers logs from applications and forwards them to logging systems, such as:
  • Fluentd or Loki: For processing and storage.
  • Elasticsearch: For querying and analysis.

Traces

  • Provides tracing data to visualize and analyze the flow of requests across distributed services, exporting this data to:
  • Grafana Tempo (for tracing).
  • Other tracing backends like Jaeger or Zipkin.

Visualization

  • Grafana can connect to telemetry data exported by OpenTelemetry to display metrics, traces, and logs on unified dashboards.