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A Guide to OpenTelemetry - Part 3: The Advantages

Pete Goldin
Editor and Publisher
APMdigest

One of the reasons OpenTelemetry is becoming so popular is because of the many advantages. In A Guide to OpenTelemetry, APMdigest breaks these advantages down into two groups: the beneficial capabilities of OpenTelemetry and the results users can expect from OpenTelemetry. In Part 3, we cover the capabilities.

Start with: A Guide to OpenTelemetry - Part 1

Start with: A Guide to OpenTelemetry - Part 2: When Will OTel Be Ready?

Universal Observability Tool

"One specification to rule them all — Companies will be able to rely on OTel for all languages and types of telemetry (logs, metrics, traces, etc) rather than distribute these capabilities among several tools" says Michael Haberman, CTO and Co-Founder of Aspecto.

Standardized Instrumentation

"Working with distributed systems is confusing enough; we need to simplify it by standardizing on a consistent set of tools," explains Mike Loukides, VP of Emerging Tech Content at O'Reilly Media. "What happens if your IT group develops part of a product, but buys several important components from a vendor? You're going to have to debug and maintain the whole system. That's going to be a nightmare if the different components don't speak the same language when saving information about their activity."

"Opentelemetry is an instrumentation standard," says Pranay Prateek, Co-Founder of SigNoz. "You can use any backend and storage layer to store telemetry data, and any front end to visualize that data. So as long as these components support the OTLP format (OpenTelemetry's format), they can process and visualize OTel data."

Interoperability

"OpenTelemetry will be valuable for the same reason that other standards are: interoperability," says Loukides from O'Reilly. "It will make it easier for developers to write software that is observable by using a single standard API and being able to plug in standard libraries. It will make it easier for people responsible for operations to integrate with existing observability platforms. If the protocol that applications use to talk to observability platforms is standardized, operations staff can mix and match dashboards, debugging tools, automation tools (AIOps), and much more."

Automated Instrumentation

"Companies no longer need their developers to spend a lot of time and headache on manually instrumenting their stack," explains Torsten Volk, Managing Research Director, Containers, DevOps, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). "Instead developers can augment the automatically instrumented app stack by adding telemetry variables to their own code to tie together application behavior and infrastructure performance. DevOps engineers and SREs automatically receive a more comprehensive and complete view of their app environment and its context. DevOps, Ops and dev all will benefit from the more consistent instrumentation through OpenTelemetry compared to manual instrumentation, as this consistency lowers the risk of blind spots within the observability dashboard."

"Instrumentation can now be shifted left by making auto instrumentation part of any type of artifact used throughout the DevOps process," he continues. "Container images, VMs, software libraries, machine learning models, and database can all come pre-instrumented to simplify the DevOps toolchain and lower the risk of critical parts of the stack flying 'under the radar' in terms of observability and visibility."

Future-Proof Instrumentation

"The main business benefit that we see from using OpenTelemetry is that it is future-proof," says Prateek from SigNoz. "OpenTelemetry is an open standard and open source implementation with contributors from companies like AWS, Microsoft, Splunk, etc. It provides instrumentation libraries in almost all major programming languages and covers most of the popular open source frameworks. If tomorrow your team decides to use a new open source library in the tech stack, you can have the peace of mind that OpenTelemetry will provide instrumentation for it."

"In a hyper-dynamic environment where services come and go, and instances can be scaled in a reactive fashion, the OpenTelemetry project aims to provide a single path for full stack visibility which is future proof and easy to apply," adds Cedric Ziel, Grafana Labs Senior Product Manager.

Cost-Effective Observability

OpenTelemetry makes observability more cost-effective in several ways.

First, it provides cost control because it is open source.

"Organizations had large opportunity-costs in the past when they switched observability providers that forced them to use proprietary SDKs and APIs," says Ziel from Grafana Labs. "Customers are demanding compatibility and a path with OpenTelemetry and are less likely to accept proprietary solutions than a few years ago."

"No vendor lock-in means more control over observability costs," Prateek from SigNoz elaborates. "The freedom to choose an observability vendor of your choice while having access to world-class instrumentation is a huge advantage to the business."

"OpenTelemetry can also help reduce the cost associated with ramping up your engineering team," he continues. "Using an open source standard helps engineering teams to create a knowledge base that is consistent and improves with time."

Second, OpenTelemetry reduces cost because it is easy to use and reduces development time.

"Standardizing generation and exporting signals provides consistency across the development organization and leads to less development cost/time," says Nitin Navare, CTO of LogicMonitor.

Go to: A Guide to OpenTelemetry - Part 4: The Results

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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A Guide to OpenTelemetry - Part 3: The Advantages

Pete Goldin
Editor and Publisher
APMdigest

One of the reasons OpenTelemetry is becoming so popular is because of the many advantages. In A Guide to OpenTelemetry, APMdigest breaks these advantages down into two groups: the beneficial capabilities of OpenTelemetry and the results users can expect from OpenTelemetry. In Part 3, we cover the capabilities.

Start with: A Guide to OpenTelemetry - Part 1

Start with: A Guide to OpenTelemetry - Part 2: When Will OTel Be Ready?

Universal Observability Tool

"One specification to rule them all — Companies will be able to rely on OTel for all languages and types of telemetry (logs, metrics, traces, etc) rather than distribute these capabilities among several tools" says Michael Haberman, CTO and Co-Founder of Aspecto.

Standardized Instrumentation

"Working with distributed systems is confusing enough; we need to simplify it by standardizing on a consistent set of tools," explains Mike Loukides, VP of Emerging Tech Content at O'Reilly Media. "What happens if your IT group develops part of a product, but buys several important components from a vendor? You're going to have to debug and maintain the whole system. That's going to be a nightmare if the different components don't speak the same language when saving information about their activity."

"Opentelemetry is an instrumentation standard," says Pranay Prateek, Co-Founder of SigNoz. "You can use any backend and storage layer to store telemetry data, and any front end to visualize that data. So as long as these components support the OTLP format (OpenTelemetry's format), they can process and visualize OTel data."

Interoperability

"OpenTelemetry will be valuable for the same reason that other standards are: interoperability," says Loukides from O'Reilly. "It will make it easier for developers to write software that is observable by using a single standard API and being able to plug in standard libraries. It will make it easier for people responsible for operations to integrate with existing observability platforms. If the protocol that applications use to talk to observability platforms is standardized, operations staff can mix and match dashboards, debugging tools, automation tools (AIOps), and much more."

Automated Instrumentation

"Companies no longer need their developers to spend a lot of time and headache on manually instrumenting their stack," explains Torsten Volk, Managing Research Director, Containers, DevOps, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). "Instead developers can augment the automatically instrumented app stack by adding telemetry variables to their own code to tie together application behavior and infrastructure performance. DevOps engineers and SREs automatically receive a more comprehensive and complete view of their app environment and its context. DevOps, Ops and dev all will benefit from the more consistent instrumentation through OpenTelemetry compared to manual instrumentation, as this consistency lowers the risk of blind spots within the observability dashboard."

"Instrumentation can now be shifted left by making auto instrumentation part of any type of artifact used throughout the DevOps process," he continues. "Container images, VMs, software libraries, machine learning models, and database can all come pre-instrumented to simplify the DevOps toolchain and lower the risk of critical parts of the stack flying 'under the radar' in terms of observability and visibility."

Future-Proof Instrumentation

"The main business benefit that we see from using OpenTelemetry is that it is future-proof," says Prateek from SigNoz. "OpenTelemetry is an open standard and open source implementation with contributors from companies like AWS, Microsoft, Splunk, etc. It provides instrumentation libraries in almost all major programming languages and covers most of the popular open source frameworks. If tomorrow your team decides to use a new open source library in the tech stack, you can have the peace of mind that OpenTelemetry will provide instrumentation for it."

"In a hyper-dynamic environment where services come and go, and instances can be scaled in a reactive fashion, the OpenTelemetry project aims to provide a single path for full stack visibility which is future proof and easy to apply," adds Cedric Ziel, Grafana Labs Senior Product Manager.

Cost-Effective Observability

OpenTelemetry makes observability more cost-effective in several ways.

First, it provides cost control because it is open source.

"Organizations had large opportunity-costs in the past when they switched observability providers that forced them to use proprietary SDKs and APIs," says Ziel from Grafana Labs. "Customers are demanding compatibility and a path with OpenTelemetry and are less likely to accept proprietary solutions than a few years ago."

"No vendor lock-in means more control over observability costs," Prateek from SigNoz elaborates. "The freedom to choose an observability vendor of your choice while having access to world-class instrumentation is a huge advantage to the business."

"OpenTelemetry can also help reduce the cost associated with ramping up your engineering team," he continues. "Using an open source standard helps engineering teams to create a knowledge base that is consistent and improves with time."

Second, OpenTelemetry reduces cost because it is easy to use and reduces development time.

"Standardizing generation and exporting signals provides consistency across the development organization and leads to less development cost/time," says Nitin Navare, CTO of LogicMonitor.

Go to: A Guide to OpenTelemetry - Part 4: The Results

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

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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