Observability & APM · Cloud Native Computing Foundation
OpenTelemetry
Vendor-neutral CNCF specification and SDK set for generating and exporting traces, metrics and logs to any backend.
OpenTelemetry is not a monitoring product but the open, vendor-neutral standard for instrumenting applications: a set of APIs, SDKs, and a Collector process that generate and route traces, metrics, and logs in a common format (OTLP). Instrument once with OpenTelemetry and the same telemetry can be shipped to Datadog, Honeycomb, Grafana, Splunk, or any OTLP-compatible backend without re-instrumenting, which is why most modern observability vendors now treat OTel ingestion as a baseline feature rather than a differentiator. It is a CNCF graduated project, maintained by contributors across the industry rather than a single vendor, and is free and self-hosted by definition — the Collector runs wherever you deploy it.
At a glance
| Vendor | Cloud Native Computing Foundation |
|---|---|
| Pricing model | Open source + paid options |
| Free tier | Yes |
| Deployment | Self-hosted |
| Open source | Yes (Apache-2.0) |
| Best for | Any team that wants to instrument once and keep the freedom to change or mix observability backends later. |
Pricing
Free specification, SDKs and Collector; cost lives entirely in whichever backend you export telemetry to.
Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.
Features
- Language SDKs (Go, Java, Python, JS, .NET, Rust, and more) for auto- and manual instrumentation
- OTLP protocol as a common export format across vendors
- Collector for receiving, processing and routing telemetry
- Semantic conventions for consistent attribute naming
- Auto-instrumentation agents for common frameworks
- Vendor-neutral avoids backend lock-in on the instrumentation layer
Integrations
Profile last reviewed September 21, 2026