Arguably, OpenTelemetry exists to (greatly) increase usage of tracing and metrics among developers. That said, logging will continue to play a critical role in providing flexible, application-specific, event-driven data. Further, OpenTelemetry has the potential to bring added value to existing application logging flows.

Connect your metrics to your traces with exemplars to quickly troubleshoot and resolve latency issues.

Open source Zipkin offers a robust set of features that make it easier for developers to understand and optimize complex distributed systems. Distributed tracing is a technique you can use to trace and monitor requests propagating through a distributed system. It can work in environments where multiple services process a request, making it an essential tool for modern microservices architectures. Zipkin is an open source distributed tracing system for monitoring and troubleshooting complex systems.

OpenTelemetry (also abbreviated as OTEL) is an increasingly popular open-source observability platform under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which is currently the most active project in the CNCF after Kubernetes. It was created to establish a unified and vendor-agnostic way for instrumenting, collecting, and exporting telemetry data for your system and application across traces, logs, and metrics.