Overview
OpenTelemetry is the open source observability framework for cloud native software, providing a single set of APIs, libraries, agents, and collector services to capture distributed traces and metrics from your application. It builds upon years of experience from the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects, combined with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community.
Developers love OpenTelemetry because it's vendor-neutral and 100% open source. You can instrument your code once using OpenTelemetry APIs and SDKs, then export telemetry data to any observability backend—Jaeger, Prometheus, commercial vendors, or your own solution. Switch backends without touching your application code.
As a CNCF graduated project, OpenTelemetry is backed by major cloud providers and trusted by industry leaders worldwide. It offers stable, production-ready APIs across 12+ languages, making it the de facto standard for modern observability.
Key Features
- Unified Observability Signals: Correlate traces, metrics, and logs with shared context that flows through your entire request path, giving you a complete picture of your application's behavior across all components and services.
- Auto-instrumentation: Get started in minutes with zero-code instrumentation for popular frameworks and libraries. Automatic instrumentation agents capture traces, metrics, and logs without modifying your source code.
- Collector Pipeline: Process, filter, and route telemetry data with the OpenTelemetry Collector. Deploy as an agent or gateway to receive, process, and export telemetry at scale with 200+ components.
- Multi-language Support: Native SDKs for 12+ languages including Java, Kotlin, Python, Go, JavaScript, .NET, Ruby, PHP, Rust, C++, Swift, and Erlang.
- Context Propagation: Automatically correlate traces across service boundaries. Distributed context flows through your entire request path, connecting logs, metrics, and traces into a unified view.
Use Cases
- Cloud Native Development:
