Overview
OpenTelemetry is an open source observability framework that provides IT teams with standardized protocols and tools for collecting and routing telemetry data. Created as an incubator project by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), OpenTelemetry provides a consistent format for instrumenting, generating, gathering, and exporting application telemetry data—namely metrics, logs, and traces—to monitoring platforms for analysis and insight.
Setup
To send OpenTelemetry metrics to Datadog, you have three main options:
For more information about which setup is right for you, see Send OpenTelemetry Data to Datadog.
Query across Datadog and OpenTelemetry metrics
Because OTel and Datadog metrics often use different naming conventions and semantic definitions, creating a unified view of your infrastructure in these environments can be challenging.
Datadog helps you bridge this gap by enabling you to:
- Query OTel and Datadog metrics together.
- Understand how OTel and Datadog metrics map to each other.
For more information, read Query Across Datadog and OpenTelemetry Metrics.
OTLP metric types
The Datadog Agent and the OpenTelemetry Collector Datadog exporter can ingest metrics in the OpenTelemetry format (OTLP), which can be produced by OpenTelemetry-instrumented applications.
For more information, read OTLP metric types.
Out-of-the-box dashboards
Datadog provides out-of-the-box dashboards that you can copy and customize. To use Datadog’s out-of-the-box OpenTelemetry dashboards, go to Dashboards > Dashboards list and search for opentelemetry:
The Host Metrics dashboard is for data collected from the host metrics receiver. The Collector Metrics dashboard is for any other types of metrics collected, depending on which metrics receiver you choose to enable.
Further reading
Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:
