OpenTelemetry: how the CNCF standard unified distributed tracing for all backends

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OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project that provides a vendor-neutral set of APIs, SDKs, and the OTLP transport protocol for generating and exporting telemetry data including traces, metrics, and logs. It was formed in 2019 through the merger of two competing and incompatible projects, OpenTracing and OpenCensus, ending ecosystem fragmentation that had forced developers to choose between the two. The unified standard gained rapid industry adoption, with major observability vendors such as Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure all supporting OTLP as a native ingestion protocol. A key benefit of OTel is that applications instrument their code once against its API and can later switch backend destinations purely through configuration, without rewriting instrumentation. Core concepts include spans as the basic unit of a timed operation, traces as the full end-to-end collection of spans for a single request, and W3C traceparent headers for propagating trace context across service boundaries.

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