Instrument once, send anywhere — the vendor-neutral standard for traces, metrics, and logs.

Welcome to OpenTelemetry: The Standard for Observability.

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is the vendor-neutral standard for generating telemetry — traces, metrics, and logs — from your software: instrument once and send the data to any backend, free from lock-in. This free book teaches it from the ground up: observability and the three signals, OTel's architecture (API/SDK, OTLP, the Collector, semantic conventions), instrumenting code (automatic and manual), the signals in depth and how they correlate, context propagation and W3C Trace Context, the OpenTelemetry Collector and telemetry pipelines, semantic conventions and exporting to backends like Jaeger and Prometheus, sampling and managing volume, and operating OpenTelemetry in production. Ten focused chapters with clear diagrams that show how to make any system observable — instrumented once, portable everywhere, with correlated traces, metrics, and logs.

This title is part of the ShriIra library and is free to read in full, right here — our small contribution to making world-class knowledge easy to reach.

A note on reading it: open the Contents menu at the top of the reader to jump between chapters, use the Aa menu to set a comfortable text size, theme (light, sepia, or night), and single- or two-page layout. Your place is saved automatically, so you can always pick up where you left off.

We hope it serves you well.

— Shriira Press

Contents

1. Chapter 1 — What OpenTelemetry Is
2. Chapter 2 — Observability and the Three Signals
3. Chapter 3 — Architecture
4. Chapter 4 — Instrumentation
5. Chapter 5 — The Signals in Depth
6. Chapter 6 — Context Propagation
7. Chapter 7 — The OpenTelemetry Collector
8. Chapter 8 — Semantic Conventions and Backends
9. Chapter 9 — Sampling and Managing Volume
10. Chapter 10 — Operating OpenTelemetry and Putting It Together