Tracing
OpenTelemetry
open source / community (CNCF)
The vendor-neutral standard for instrumenting apps and routing telemetry to any backend (SDKs, OTLP, Collector) — the lingua franca every modern tool now ingests.
- Category
- Tracing
- License
- Open source
- Deployment
- Self-hosted
- Cost
- Free
- Free tier
- Yes
- Self-host effort
- Moderate
- Maturity
- Incumbent
- Popularity
- 2nd most active CNCF project after Kubernetes
The catch
"Switch any time" is oversold — it generates and ships telemetry but stores/visualizes nothing, and distros + semantic-convention churn + backend-specific features still create friction.
Monitors
MetricsLogsTraces
Protocols
OTLP
Built for
SRE / DevOpsDevelopers