Introducing OpenTelemetry
At its core, OpenTelemetry (commonly abbreviated as OTel) is not a tangible technology such as Prometheus, Thanos, or Kubernetes. It’s not something that you “run,” per se. Instead, OpenTelemetry is a specification.
The OpenTelemetry project itself was born out of a rare event: the consolidation of two competing open source projects. Before OpenTelemetry became a project, two competing open source standards sought to address the problem of vendor lock-in in the observability space: OpenCensus and OpenTracing.
OpenCensus, which began in 2017, was the open source solution sponsored by Google and covered both tracing and metrics. OpenTracing, which began in 2016, was a CNCF project (like Prometheus and Kubernetes) and was – as its name implies – primarily focused on tracing. However, as one of my favorite XKCD comics explains, multiple competing standards are less than ideal.
Figure 14.1 –...
