Glossary · Web & App Development
OpenTelemetry
Overview
What OpenTelemetry is
OpenTelemetry, often shortened to OTel, is an open-source, vendor-neutral framework for observability. It gives developers a single, standard set of APIs, SDKs, and tools to generate and collect telemetry data from their software, the traces, metrics, and logs that show how an application is behaving. It is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project formed by merging OpenTracing and OpenCensus.
How it works
You instrument your code, automatically or manually, with OpenTelemetry SDKs, which produce standardized telemetry. That data is sent, usually over the OTLP protocol, to the OpenTelemetry Collector or directly to an observability backend. The Collector can process, filter, and route the data to tools like Jaeger, Prometheus, Grafana, or a commercial platform, without changing your application code.
Why it matters for your business
OpenTelemetry standardizes monitoring so teams can trace requests across services, diagnose slowdowns, and understand failures faster, without locking into one vendor's agents. In backend development and app modernization, a full-service team instruments systems with OTel so observability is consistent and portable, and switching or adding monitoring tools later doesn't mean re-instrumenting everything.
Where we use it
Related Zen in Tech services
How our team puts OpenTelemetry to work in real projects.
FAQ
OpenTelemetry — common questions
Is OpenTelemetry free?
Yes. OpenTelemetry is open source under the Apache 2.0 license as a CNCF project. You may still pay for the observability backend or platform you send the telemetry data to.
OpenTelemetry vs Datadog, how do they relate?
OpenTelemetry is the open standard for collecting telemetry; Datadog is a commercial observability platform. You can use OpenTelemetry to gather data and send it to Datadog (or others), which avoids depending on vendor-specific agents.
Do I need OpenTelemetry?
If you run distributed services or microservices and want standardized, portable monitoring across traces, metrics, and logs, OpenTelemetry is the emerging default worth adopting.
Need OpenTelemetry done right?
Book a free consultation and we’ll map the fastest, most cost-effective path for your project.
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