

OpenTelemetry libraries instrument application code to generate telemetry data that is then sent to an observability tool for storage & visualization

OpenTelemetry aims to fill that space and is doing a great job at it thus far. With microservices and polyglot architectures, there was a need to have a global standard. Telemetry data has become critical to observe the state of distributed systems. OpenTelemetry provides a vendor-agnostic method of collecting telemetry data. CNCF is the same foundation which incubated Kubernetes too. OpenTelemetry is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project created after the merger of OpenCensus(from Google) and OpenTracing(from Uber). OpenTelemetry is a set of API, SDKs, libraries, and integrations that aims to standardize the generation, collection, and management of telemetry data(logs, metrics, and traces). These metrics can be aggregated to give insights into the behavior of your systems. Prometheus enables you to capture time-series data as metrics. Prometheus is a time-series metrics monitoring tool. OpenTelemetry follows a specification driven development and has implementations in all major programming languages. It provides a set of tools, APIs, and SDKs to create and manage telemetry data(logs, metrics, and traces).

OpenTelemetry is a vendor-agnostic instrumentation library. In this article, let us understand the key differences between the two projects and explore their advantages and shortcomings. OpenTelemetry and Prometheus are both open-source projects under Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
