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.

If your applications and services are instrumented with OpenTelemetry libraries, you can choose how to get traces, metrics, and logs data to the Datadog backend:

1. Send data to the OpenTelemetry collector, and use the Datadog exporter to forward it to Datadog, or

2. Ingest data with the Datadog Agent, which collects it for Datadog.

Datadog supports the W3C Trace Context standard, ensuring complete traces are captured even when a request travels between services that have been instrumented with different tools. Services need only be instrumented with any system, such as an OpenTelemetry library or Datadog tracing library, that follows the W3C Trace Context standard. Read Propagating Trace Context for more information.

Further reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

Datadog's partnership with OpenTelemetryBLOG Monitor OpenTelemetry-instrumented apps with support for W3C Trace ContextBLOG Send metrics and traces from OpenTelemetry Collector to Datadog via Datadog ExporterBLOG Forward logs from the OpenTelemetry Collector with the Datadog ExporterBLOG OTLP ingestion in the AgentBLOG Learn more about AWS's managed Lambda Layer for OpenTelemetryBLOG Correlate Datadog RUM events with traces from OpenTelemetry-instrumented applicationsBLOG Monitor runtime metrics from OTel-instrumented apps with Datadog APMBLOG