OpenTelemetry and Observability Tools

OpenTelemetry (also known as OTel) is a popular open-source framework used to generate telemetry data for traces, metrics, events, and logs.

In this guide, we are going to cover the best observability and application performance management tools that can be used alongside OpenTelemetry to transform telemetry data into responsive reporting dashboards.

Introduction To OpenTelemetry

The OpenTelemetry project is a collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs that are used to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry and provides you with everything you need to manage telemetry data.

Deciding upon a permanent instrumentation option for applications is becoming increasingly difficult for software engineers. By using an open-source solution such as the one provided by OpenTelemetry, it is far easier to avoid being locked into using a single application to monitor and analyze your data.

By standardizing traces, metrics, events, and logs into telemetry data, we avoid being locked into using a single analysis tool in the long run, and migrating to a different platform will not affect the accuracy of historic data.

OpenTelemetry provides everything developers and engineers need to standardize how to collect telemetry data so that you can send this data to any backend of your choosing. This provides a vendor-neutral path to instrumentation and allows you to change your backend easily without having to instrument your code again from scratch.

OpenTelemetry Components

The OpenTelemetry collector is a key data pipeline component to have in any OpenTelemetry deployment. If you are collecting OpenTelemetry data, you will have to run the OpenTelemetry collector either by yourself or through a vendor.

For a typical deployment, the OpenTelemetry SDK is installed in both services, and when these services are sending data, they will be sending it to the OpenTelemetry collector. The OpenTelemetry collector will then fetch this data and distribute it to any destination you’ve configured, such as Jaeger or a proprietary service (like the ones included in this guide).

The OpenTelemetry collector handles multiple responsibilities, including receiving data in the right protocol and format, exporting this data to the right destination, and providing processing mechanisms that allow you to filter, buffer, and alter the data in between receiving and exporting.

Even if you are not running the OpenTelemetry collector yourself, you will still likely have an OpenTelemetry SDK in place, either a native one or one belonging to a proprietary service. From there, data will be sent to the vendor's collector.

A collector contains pipelines which include specific processing for metrics, traces, and logs, which are just a few of the main data types that OpenTelemetry can ingest.

Harnessing Telemetry Data

Once data is collected and transferred using OTel, it will then need to be processed using another analysis tool to provide insights in a readily consumable format.

When selecting a compatible backend for sending telemetry data, whether it is another open-source tool or a proprietary service, you will want to ensure that it supports the OTLP (OpenTelemetry protocol) format.

Observability Tools Supporting OpenTelemetry

Splunk

Splunk's native support for OpenTelemetry is built with the intent of making OpenTelemetry the de facto way for all users to send data to Splunk. Many of OpenTelemetry's standards have been proposed by Splunk employees.

Dynatrace

Dynatrace is fully compatible with OpenTelemetry and offers out-of-the-box integration along with automatic capturing of transactions and completely automatic instrumentation.

Logit.io

If you wish to handle your OpenTelemetry data in an external analysis tool, platforms like Logit.io for OpenTelemetry provide complete cross-compatibility to handle telemetry data.

AppDynamics

AppDynamics for OpenTelemetry offers a fully compatible backend for ingesting trace data that can easily be viewed in the AppDynamics controller.

New Relic

New Relic's capabilities for handling telemetry data allow for instrumentation of applications once to send telemetry data to their observability platform.

Datadog

Datadog can leverage and process telemetry data via its agent, which is fully compatible with the OTLP.

AWS

AWS Distro For OTel is a production-ready distribution of the OpenTelemetry project that provides application instrumentation that only needs to be configured once.

Honeycomb.io

Honeycomb and OpenTelemetry work together for easy ingestion of telemetry data and support a vendor-agnostic collector.

Lightstep

Lightstep’s compatibility with OpenTelemetry allows users to capture distributed metrics and traces, contributing to the wider OpenTelemetry community.