Skill of the Month – OpenTelemetry

What is OpenTelemetry? 

OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework that provides tools for collecting metrics, logs, and traces from applications and infrastructure. It enables businesses to monitor performance, detect issues, and understand system behaviour while supporting a wide range of technologies and platforms.

What are some things to know about OpenTelemetry?

• It provides a unified standard for metrics, logs, and distributed traces across cloud and on-prem systems.
• It supports multiple programming languages and integrates with popular frameworks, libraries, and monitoring platforms.
• It helps teams improve reliability, performance, and troubleshooting through consistent, end-to-end observability data.

Why learn OpenTelemetry?

Learning OpenTelemetry can strengthen careers by building expertise in observability, a core requirement for modern distributed systems. As organisations rely on microservices, cloud platforms, and APIs, OpenTelemetry skills are increasingly valuable across roles in backend engineering, DevOps, and site reliability engineering.

OpenTelemetry’s ability to collect metrics, traces, and logs from applications makes it a powerful tool for understanding system behaviour at scale. Mastering it helps professionals diagnose performance issues, trace requests across services, and gain visibility into complex architectures running on Kubernetes, cloud platforms, or hybrid environments.

OpenTelemetry also simplifies monitoring by providing a single, vendor-neutral standard that integrates with many observability platforms and cloud providers. Expertise in OpenTelemetry allows teams to reduce tooling fragmentation, improve troubleshooting workflows, and focus on building reliable systems rather than stitching together disconnected monitoring solutions.

Use Cases for OpenTelemetry

Microservices Observability: Teams running microservices use OpenTelemetry to trace requests across services, identifying latency issues and failures in distributed APIs without relying on vendor-specific tooling.

Cloud and Platform Monitoring: Engineering teams adopt OpenTelemetry to collect consistent metrics and logs from cloud workloads, containers, and Kubernetes clusters, making it easier to monitor performance across dynamic environments.

Incident Response and Troubleshooting: Enterprises use OpenTelemetry data to speed up incident investigation, correlating traces, logs, and metrics to pinpoint root causes and reduce downtime during system outages.

Topic of the Month

Observability at Scale with OpenTelemetry

Visibility Across Modern Systems

OpenTelemetry is reshaping how teams understand what’s happening inside their systems. By standardising how metrics, logs, and traces are collected, it gives engineers clear visibility into complex, distributed architectures.

This is especially valuable for microservices, cloud-native platforms, and API-driven systems, where performance issues are often hidden across multiple services.

From Monitoring to Insight

OpenTelemetry helps teams move beyond basic monitoring toward meaningful insight. Correlating traces, logs, and metrics makes it easier to diagnose issues, reduce alert fatigue, and understand real user impact.

As systems grow more complex in 2026, organisations are adopting OpenTelemetry to improve reliability, shorten incident response times, and operate software with confidence at scale.

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