OpenTelemetry (OTel)
An open, vendor-neutral standard and set of SDKs for producing and sending traces, metrics and logs.
OpenTelemetry is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project formed by merging OpenTracing and OpenCensus. It defines the APIs, SDKs and the OTLP protocol, but it is not a backend: the data goes to a tool you choose, open source or commercial. Many platforms and libraries emit it out of the box.
Related terms
- Observability (o11y): Being able to tell what a running system is doing, and why, from the data it emits: logs, metrics and traces.
- LLM observability: Tracing every model call with inputs, outputs, latency, tokens, cost and the user outcome.
- SLO and SLI: An SLI is a measured indicator of service quality; an SLO is the internal target for it, stricter than any SLA you sign.
