321 Opentelemetry Otel Fundamentals

title: “3.2.1: OpenTelemetry (OTEL) Fundamentals” tags: [“kb”]

3.2.1: OpenTelemetry (OTEL) Fundamentals

Summary: OpenTelemetry (OTEL) is an open-source observability framework for standardizing the generation, collection, and exportation of telemetry data (traces, metrics, and logs). It provides a vendor-agnostic toolkit for instrumenting cloud-native applications.

Details:

• Core Components:
  • APIs: Language-agnostic interfaces for instrumentation.
  • SDKs: Language-specific implementations of the APIs.
  • Collector: A proxy for receiving, processing, and exporting telemetry data.
  • Exporters: Components that send data to various backends.
  • OTLP: The native protocol for transmitting telemetry data.
• Key Concepts:
  • Traces: Represent the end-to-end journey of a request through a distributed system.
  • Metrics: Aggregated numerical data about system performance.
  • Logs: Timestamped records of events.
• Benefits:
  • Standardization: Provides a single standard for observability.
  • Vendor Neutrality: Avoids vendor lock-in.
  • Comprehensive Observability: Supports traces, metrics, and logs.

Source Research: ai/tasks/outputs/research-otel-basics-001.md