OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry gives you a shared way to produce and move telemetry from software. Telemetry is data that describes what a system did. OpenTelemetry focuses on traces, metrics, and logs. It also defines common metadata and a protocol for carrying that data.

This boundary matters. OpenTelemetry is not the database that stores telemetry. It is not the user interface where you search traces or build dashboards. You send its output to an observability backend that stores, queries, and presents the data.

Start with the telemetry path

A useful mental model has five stages:

application → instrumentation → SDK → exporter → Collector → backend