OpenTelemetry, sometimes known as OTEL or OTeL, is a collection of specifications, tools, APIs, and SDKs that support open-source instrumentations and observability frameworks for software. OpenTelemetry aims to address the full range of observability signals across distributed traces, metrics and logs — which is helpful for IT teams to generate, collect, and export data for analysis and to understand software performance and behavior.
OpenTelemetry provides a standard for observability instrument additions on cloud-native applications. This is beneficial for organizations by cutting the time it takes to develop mechanisms for collecting application data.
OpenTelemtry’s concept was created by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and is the result of a merge between OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects. OpenTelemetry v1.0 was released in February of 2021. As of 2023, the tracing and baggage specifications are completely stable and covered by long term support, according to CNCF. OpenTelemetry Metrics and OpenTelemetry Logging is currently under active development.