5.2OpenTelemetry Architecture

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is the CNCF standard for collecting telemetry data. It provides vendor-neutral APIs, SDKs, and a collector for traces, metrics, and logs.

  [Service A]        [Service B]         [Service C]
  OTel SDK           OTel SDK            OTel SDK
      |                  |                    |
      v                  v                    v
  +-------------------------------------------------------+
  |              OpenTelemetry Collector                  |
  |  (receives, processes, exports telemetry data)        |
  +-------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+
          |           |           |           |
          v           v           v           v
       [Jaeger]   [Grafana    [Datadog]   [Cloud
                   Tempo]                  provider]

Why OpenTelemetry Specifically?

• Vendor neutral. Switch backends (Jaeger, Datadog, Grafana Tempo) without changing application code
• CNCF standard. Backed by Google, Microsoft, Splunk, and most observability vendors
• Auto-instrumentation. Instrument HTTP, database, and messaging libraries with zero code changes
• Context propagation. Automatically propagates trace context across service boundaries via HTTP headers