OpenTelemetry

Your team switches monitoring tools and finds out that a probe has to be reinstalled in every application. That is exactly the problem OpenTelemetry sets out to avoid. This open standard defines a common way to produce and carry traces (the path of a request from one service to the next), metrics (figures recorded at regular intervals) and logs (the journal lines written by applications). You instrument once, then send the data wherever you want.

The project moves fast. New signals, new data models and new installation tools keep arriving. They are not all at the same stage. This section of the technical dimension follows those changes.

Each article starts from a problem an operations team actually runs into, explains the mechanism, then says where the piece stands at the date of the article. The project uses four levels: stable (you can rely on it), beta, alpha (may still change in incompatible ways) and development (the earliest stage). I read these statuses in the project sources and date them, because they change.

If you are new to OpenTelemetry, I suggest starting with OpenTelemetry end to end, in the technical dimension. It follows one step of a trace, called a span, from the application to storage and sets out the vocabulary used here.

Three ways in

Through a story first. Once Upon a Time, OpenTelemetry… tells logs, metrics, traces and the Collector in the kitchen of a big restaurant, without a single technical word.

Through a video next. The OpenTelemetry project publishes a series for beginners, “OTel for Beginners”. This episode asks the starting question, “What is OTel?”:

What is OTel? | OTel for Beginners - The JavaScript JourneyA video by the official OpenTelemetry channelWatch on YouTube →

The video opens on YouTube: this site embeds no third-party player.

Hands on, finally. The diagram OpenTelemetry, step by step follows a signal from the application to storage. At each step, it says what the engineer, the manager, the business or leadership gain from it.

The articles

Once Upon a Time, OpenTelemetry…, published on 12 October 2026, tells the project as a story, for people who have never heard of it.

Entities, Profiles, Injector, published on 10 October 2026, follows three pieces through one incident: a way of saying which object emits the data, a fourth signal that goes down to the code and a mechanism that installs the probes without touching the applications.

OpenTelemetry and reversibility, published on 10 October 2026, starts from one observation: data is portable, operations are not. It describes six layers of reversibility, Mean Time To Exit (how long it takes to leave a vendor), DORA and the Data Act.

OpenTelemetry in industry: where things stand, published on 11 October 2026, explains what drives adoption in plants, what OpenTelemetry already observes there, what holds it back and where to start.

OpenTelemetry close to the machines, published on 11 October 2026, builds the bridge between shop-floor protocols (OPC UA, MQTT, Sparkplug B) and the Collector: where to place each part depending on the network zones, which data model to pick, how to hold up at the edge, meaning right next to the machines.

Practising

The OpenTelemetry labs gather what is published on the forge around the project. REVERSOTEL is a control plane for a fleet of Collectors: a central point that manages the configuration of these relays, whose job is to receive, sort and forward the data. GENAIOTEL is a RAG application (an assistant that searches documents before it answers) instrumented with the GenAI conventions. OTELAUDITEXP is an audit exporter for the Collector. An exporter is the part of the Collector that sends data to its destination; this one is there to prove which data left, unaltered.

To explore without installing anything, there is OpenTelemetry, step by step, the animated Collector pipeline and the trace explorer.

Links to the other dimensions

An open standard also has a bearing on cost, governance and the freedom to change vendors. Each article in this section comes back to it in its Bridges box.