This article was published in The New Stack. For most developers, software development means there is an API for almost everything, hardware is provisioned via the cloud and the core focus is on building only the features most crucial to your business. Of course, all these integrations and modern distributed architectures create their own set of problems. Having full insight into your application has become even more important and is now commonly known as observability.

Monitoring and observability have increased with software applications moving from monolithic to distributed microservice architectures. While observability and application monitoring share similar definitions, they also have some differences. The purpose of both monitoring and observability is to find issues in an application. However, monitoring aims to capture already known issues and display them on a dashboard to understand their root cause and the time they occurred.

The scope of the OpenTelemetry project encompasses how telemetry data is collected, processed, and transmitted. The OpenTelemetry project is not involved with how the data is stored, displayed, or used beyond the collection and transmission phases. The OpenTelemetry Collector is an application written in Go.