What is opentelemetry and why is it important for modern application development?

OpenTelemetry is an open-source project member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) that aims to provide standardized APIs, SDKs and tools for gathering telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces).

In the context of increasingly complex distributed systems and microservice architectures, it becomes a must tool to analyze applications performance and behavior.

Principal features

• Ease of Integration: OpenTelemetry offers libraries and agents to easily integrate and automatize the process of capturing and sending telemetry data.

• Standardization: A set of standard libraries and APIs provide consistency and a common approach dealing with telemetry data while avoiding a vendor lock-in.

• Adoption and Community: OpenTelemetry is widely adopted by the community and across industries, ensuring that it will stay relevant becoming a de-facto standard.

In summary:
OpenTelemetry is a tool to make software observability accessible and standardized for everyone