OpenTelemetry is an open-source project that merged from the OpenCensus and OpenTracing projects in 2019. It has become a standard for instrumenting cloud-native applications and focuses on three types of telemetry data: logs, metrics, and traces.
To analyze the data collected by OpenTelemetry, various backend tools are available. Some of the prominent tools compatible with OpenTelemetry data are:
- SigNoz: An open-source OpenTelemetry tool that supports all three signals (logs, metrics, traces) and uses ClickHouse for log analytics. It offers visualization for RED metrics and detailed views of tracing data through flamegraphs and Gantt charts.
- Jaeger: An open-source distributed tracing system that provides monitoring of transactions, root cause analysis, and service dependency analysis.
- Prometheus: Primarily a metrics monitoring and alerting toolkit that uses a pull-based model to scrape data from applications and services. It is often combined with Grafana for advanced visualization.
- Honeycomb: A full-stack cloud-based observability tool that integrates with OpenTelemetry for collecting telemetry data, offering advanced querying capabilities and visualization tools.
- Datadog: A comprehensive monitoring platform that recommends using the Datadog agent to instrument applications but can also utilize OpenTelemetry libraries. Its support for OpenTelemetry data visualization is not as extensive compared to its own agent.
- New Relic: Known for application performance monitoring, it also accepts OpenTelemetry data for analysis, although its support for OpenTelemetry visualizations may not be as extensive as for their proprietary agent.
When choosing an OpenTelemetry tool, consider the following:
- Support for OpenTelemetry signals: A good tool should be able to ingest and visualize logs, metrics, and traces.
- Native support for OpenTelemetry semantic conventions: It should be able to store data with OpenTelemetry semantic conventions without transforming it into proprietary formats.
- Utilization of OpenTelemetry data: The tool should enable the generation of insights from OpenTelemetry data.
- Open-source: While not mandatory, an open-source tool can offer more flexibility and alleviate data privacy concerns.
SigNoz is recommended as an OpenTelemetry-native solution, offering support for all signals and semantic conventions. It is open-source and can be self-hosted, with detailed instructions available for those interested.