OpenTelemetry (OTel) is an open source, vendor-neutral observability solution that consists of a suite of components—including APIs, SDKs, and the OTel Collector—that allow teams to monitor their applications and services in a standardized format. OTel defines this data via the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP), a standard for the encoding and transfer of telemetry data that organizations can use to collect, process, and export telemetry and route it to observability backends, such as Datadog.