OpenTelemetry (OTel) is an open-source, vendor-neutral observability solution that provides a suite of components—including APIs, SDKs, and a data collector—that enable teams to collect and communicate telemetry data from cloud-native applications and services. OTel also defines the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP), a standard for the encoding and transfer of telemetry data.

Kubernetes is one of the most important and influential technologies for building and operating software today because it’s so incredibly capable. It’s flexible, available, resilient, scalable, feature-rich and backed by a global community of innovators — that’s a pretty impressive list of intangibles to apply to any particular capability.

OpenTelemetry (OTEL) is an observability platform designed to generate and collect telemetry data across various observability pillars, and its popularity has grown as organizations look to take advantage of it. It’s the most active Cloud Native Computing Foundation project after Kubernetes, and it’s progressing at an immense pace on many fronts. The core project is expanding beyond the “three pillars” into new signals, such as continuous profiling.