Instrument once, observe anywhere. OpenTelemetry turns observability back into your choice, not your vendor's revenue strategy.
The observability market matured into a comfortable oligopoly. A few cloud-first players own your agents, your data format, and the only exporter the CFO thinks is "safe." Switching costs stay high by design- proprietary protocols, pricing lock-ins, and closed dashboards keep teams from demanding better value.
OpenTelemetry (OTel) changes the power balance. By standardizing how signals are collected, described, and routed, OTel makes it trivial to move your telemetry wherever you want - self-hosted backends, new vendors, or a mix of both. That portability is the only real antidote to the observability cartel.
Instrument Once, Reuse Everywhere
Instrumentation churn is the number-one reason teams stay put. Rewriting metrics, traces, and logs across microservices is painful. OpenTelemetry gives you:
Language-neutral SDKs – Choose your stack (Go, Rust, Python, JS, Java, .NET, more) and get the same semantic conventions everywhere.
– Choose your stack (Go, Rust, Python, JS, Java, .NET, more) and get the same semantic conventions everywhere. Stable semantic conventions – Dimensions like http.method , db.system , and service.name have shared meaning, so pipelines and dashboards can move without breaking queries.
– Dimensions like , , and have shared meaning, so pipelines and dashboards can move without breaking queries. Auto-instrumentation where it matters – Drop-in agents cover HTTP, gRPC, SQL, Kafka, Redis, and more. Manual work narrows to business-specific spans and metrics.
Once you go all-in on OTel, the instrumentation burden stops being vendor-specific. New backends inherit the exact same schema.
The Collector Is the Control Plane
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