What is OpenTelemetry?
An open-source observability framework for generating metrics, logs, and traces.
OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a CNCF project that provides a vendor-neutral, open-source standard for generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry data (metrics, logs, traces). It consists of: specification, APIs and SDKs (for instrumenting code), and the OpenTelemetry Collector (for receiving, processing, and exporting data). OTel replaces vendor-specific agents (Datadog, Jaeger) with one standard. Most observability vendors (Datadog, Grafana, Honeycomb) accept OTLP format.
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Related Terms
More Monitoring Terms
AlertManager
Prometheus component that handles alert routing, grouping, and notification delivery.
Error Budget
The acceptable amount of downtime or errors before an SLO is breached.
Grafana
An open-source analytics and visualization platform for metrics, logs, and traces.
Loki
Grafana's horizontally scalable log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus.
Observability
The ability to understand the internal state of a system from its external outputs.
Prometheus
An open-source monitoring system that scrapes and stores time-series metrics.
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