This article compares OpenTelemetry and traditional APM tools with their strengths, weaknesses, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right solution for your application performance monitoring needs.

We recently released two new Raygun API endpoints that expose time series aggregations for particular metrics. They enable you to consolidate your company’s metrics into an external dashboard (such as Grafana, Tableau, or PowerBI), correlate errors and page performance with data points that Raygun cannot see, or even perform advanced data analysis.

OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing are open-source projects used to instrument application code for generating telemetry data. While OpenTelemetry can help you generate logs, metrics, and traces, OpenTracing focuses on generating traces for distributed applications. If you’re thinking of choosing between OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing, go for OpenTelemetry. OpenTracing is now deprecated, and users of OpenTracing are advised to migrate to OpenTelemetry.

Both Kibana and Grafana are data visualization tools providing users capabilities to explore, analyze and visualize data with dashboards. The difference between Kibana and Grafana lies in their genesis. Kibana was built on top of the Elasticsearch stack, famous for log analysis and management. In comparison, Grafana was created mainly for metrics monitoring supporting visualization for time-series databases.

OpenTelemetry and DataDog are both used for monitoring applications. While OpenTelemetry is an open source observability framework, DataDog is a cloud-monitoring SaaS service. OpenTelemetry is a collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs that help generate and collect telemetry data (logs, metrics, and traces). OpenTelemetry does not provide a storage and visualization layer, while DataDog does.

In complex IT environments, monitoring and observability tools are indispensable. They help organizations ensure optimal performance of applications and infrastructure, providing insights and alerts to address potential issues before they impact users. Two of the leading tools in this space are Datadog and Dynatrace. This article offers a comprehensive comparison of these platforms to help you decide which is best for your needs in 2024.