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Developers Can Leverage OpenTelemetry to Achieve Fuller Visibility

Michael Olechna
Guardsquare

Observability is currently a hot topic. Businesses and consumers are increasingly relying on digital apps for everyday functions, which means every company needs a high performing app or website. When you take a minute to evaluate why, the numbers quickly make sense. In 2025, the number of mobile users worldwide is projected to reach 7.49 billion. And as digital adoption continues to grow, so does users' quality expectations. Each one of those users, including developers, is expecting a frictionless, high-quality experience. As end-user experiences become more connected with an organization's bottom line, a solution to catch performance hiccups becomes necessary. Hence the adoption of front-end observability through initiatives like digital experience monitoring. And who better to execute this initiative than the developers writing the code. But there's a problem with traditional observability tools tailored for DevOps, SRE, and IT teams. Developers need a tool that can be portable and vendor agnostic, given the advent of microservices. It may be clear an issue is occurring; what may not be clear is if it's part of a distributed system or the app itself. Enter OpenTelemetry, commonly referred to as OTel, an open-source framework that provides a standardized way of collecting and exporting telemetry data (logs, metrics, and traces) from cloud-native software. Prior to the onset of OpenTelemetry, there was a lack of standardization when collecting and instrumenting telemetry data. When it came to code instrumentation, there was significant variation. Due to this variation, the result was a lack of data portability and a burden on the developer to maintain large, complex instrumentation libraries. This doesn't just add significant time and effort on the developer's part. This directly impacts visibility into app performance, potentially leading to a negative end user experience. It also creates vendor lock-in and inefficiencies that can be costly for an organization, further affecting business revenue. As the market shifts toward developer-first observability, the need for a solution like OTel becomes readily apparent — explaining its rapid rise in popularity since its launch in 2019. OTel gave developers a way to ingest, view, and export telemetry data. The best part (or one of many)? It's vendor agnostic. This unified method of collecting data makes it easier for modern development teams to get a clearer, more complete picture of their apps' health and performance. The platform also provides a rich set of APIs and SDKs that are also vendor agnostic. With full control of their data, development teams can quickly instrument cloud-native apps and get started with ease. When drilling down into specific benefits, perhaps the most important feature is OTel's versatility. In addition to being vendor agnostic, the platform supports a wide range of vendors, both commercial and open source. This is key to developers being able to leverage their telemetry data long-term because they have the ability to take it with them. Should they choose to change vendors, it's as easy as exporting their OTel data to their new vendor. This eliminates the manual and time intensive process of data re-instrumentation. When discussing use cases for these benefits, three specific examples immediately come to light. The first is faster identification of performance bottlenecks. By examining telemetry data in OTel, teams can determine performance bottlenecks by tracking the time it takes to execute individual operations. Leveraging this information provides critical context to help solve application performance issues and optimize app performance. The second use case is troubleshooting problems. OTel provides a single source of truth for all telemetry data in a distributed system. Thus, development teams can track the flow of execution through their systems by examining OTel data. Developers can track down the root cause of the issue for faster resolution and ensure they are treating the cause, not a symptom. The third use case, data control, relates to one of the key benefits — OTel's versatility. OpenTelemetry is designed to work and integrate with various observability tools and platforms. This includes backends and popular tracing systems like Jaeger, as well as other metrics and logging solutions. Again, this puts data control back in the hands of developers. They can select the tools they are comfortable with or continue using what's already in their workflow, while maintaining a clear view of their app's telemetry data. By adopting OpenTelemetry, developers gain fully contextualized visibility into their distributed applications. In turn, they're able to identify performance bottlenecks faster, get down to the root cause to debug issues, optimize their resource utilization, and improve the overall reliability and user experience of their software systems.

Michael Olechna is Product Marketing Manager at Guardsquare

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Developers Can Leverage OpenTelemetry to Achieve Fuller Visibility

Michael Olechna
Guardsquare

Observability is currently a hot topic. Businesses and consumers are increasingly relying on digital apps for everyday functions, which means every company needs a high performing app or website. When you take a minute to evaluate why, the numbers quickly make sense. In 2025, the number of mobile users worldwide is projected to reach 7.49 billion. And as digital adoption continues to grow, so does users' quality expectations. Each one of those users, including developers, is expecting a frictionless, high-quality experience. As end-user experiences become more connected with an organization's bottom line, a solution to catch performance hiccups becomes necessary. Hence the adoption of front-end observability through initiatives like digital experience monitoring. And who better to execute this initiative than the developers writing the code. But there's a problem with traditional observability tools tailored for DevOps, SRE, and IT teams. Developers need a tool that can be portable and vendor agnostic, given the advent of microservices. It may be clear an issue is occurring; what may not be clear is if it's part of a distributed system or the app itself. Enter OpenTelemetry, commonly referred to as OTel, an open-source framework that provides a standardized way of collecting and exporting telemetry data (logs, metrics, and traces) from cloud-native software. Prior to the onset of OpenTelemetry, there was a lack of standardization when collecting and instrumenting telemetry data. When it came to code instrumentation, there was significant variation. Due to this variation, the result was a lack of data portability and a burden on the developer to maintain large, complex instrumentation libraries. This doesn't just add significant time and effort on the developer's part. This directly impacts visibility into app performance, potentially leading to a negative end user experience. It also creates vendor lock-in and inefficiencies that can be costly for an organization, further affecting business revenue. As the market shifts toward developer-first observability, the need for a solution like OTel becomes readily apparent — explaining its rapid rise in popularity since its launch in 2019. OTel gave developers a way to ingest, view, and export telemetry data. The best part (or one of many)? It's vendor agnostic. This unified method of collecting data makes it easier for modern development teams to get a clearer, more complete picture of their apps' health and performance. The platform also provides a rich set of APIs and SDKs that are also vendor agnostic. With full control of their data, development teams can quickly instrument cloud-native apps and get started with ease. When drilling down into specific benefits, perhaps the most important feature is OTel's versatility. In addition to being vendor agnostic, the platform supports a wide range of vendors, both commercial and open source. This is key to developers being able to leverage their telemetry data long-term because they have the ability to take it with them. Should they choose to change vendors, it's as easy as exporting their OTel data to their new vendor. This eliminates the manual and time intensive process of data re-instrumentation. When discussing use cases for these benefits, three specific examples immediately come to light. The first is faster identification of performance bottlenecks. By examining telemetry data in OTel, teams can determine performance bottlenecks by tracking the time it takes to execute individual operations. Leveraging this information provides critical context to help solve application performance issues and optimize app performance. The second use case is troubleshooting problems. OTel provides a single source of truth for all telemetry data in a distributed system. Thus, development teams can track the flow of execution through their systems by examining OTel data. Developers can track down the root cause of the issue for faster resolution and ensure they are treating the cause, not a symptom. The third use case, data control, relates to one of the key benefits — OTel's versatility. OpenTelemetry is designed to work and integrate with various observability tools and platforms. This includes backends and popular tracing systems like Jaeger, as well as other metrics and logging solutions. Again, this puts data control back in the hands of developers. They can select the tools they are comfortable with or continue using what's already in their workflow, while maintaining a clear view of their app's telemetry data. By adopting OpenTelemetry, developers gain fully contextualized visibility into their distributed applications. In turn, they're able to identify performance bottlenecks faster, get down to the root cause to debug issues, optimize their resource utilization, and improve the overall reliability and user experience of their software systems.

Michael Olechna is Product Marketing Manager at Guardsquare

Hot Topics

The Latest

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...