OpenTelemetry Standards

OpenTelemetry (OTEL) is a vendor-neutral standard for collecting observability data (traces, metrics, logs) from applications. Language SDKs auto-instrument popular libraries (HTTP, databases, caches). Data is exported to any backend (Jaeger, Datadog, New Relic, etc) via OTEL protocol. Benefit: applications instrumented once, data sent to multiple backends, swappable without code changes.