OpenTelemetry (OTel) is an observability framework and toolkit designed to facilitate the generation, export, and collection of telemetry data. As an open-source, vendor-neutral, and tool-agnostic framework, OTel supports instrumentation across different applications and systems, regardless of the programming language, infrastructure, and runtime environments you use.
Together with OTel, OpenSearch provides the frontend observability tools to create powerful visualizations and unlock intelligent analytics. With a full observability stack in place, you have the power to turn data into insights and awareness into action.
Effective telemetry tooling
Telemetry data
Logs, metrics, and traces form the foundation for developers, DevOps, and IT teams to understand their systems’ behavior and performance.
OpenTelemetry Collector
The OpenTelemetry Collector receives, processes, and exports telemetry data in multiple formats, then prepares and filters it for export.
Language SDKs
Using the OpenTelemetry API, language software development kits (SDKs) let you generate and export telemetry data to your backend.
Instrumentation
Extensive instrumentation libraries provide extensive tooling to generate telemetry data from the libraries and frameworks you use.
Exporters
Exporters provide the ability to make changes to your backend. You can also upload data to more than one backend, depending on your needs.
Flexibility, simplicity, performance
Standardization
OTel lets DevOps teams collect and export telemetry data consistently, without changes to their instrumentation. It saves time through easy setup and eliminates the need to create in-house observability solutions.
Vendor-neutrality
Accommodating multiple vendors gives you the power to future-proof your investments. Better scalability, compatibility, and integration lead to easier expansion and adaptation as your needs evolve.
Elevated performance
Better visibility into performance and reliability for your key applications helps you optimize operations and resolve issues faster. That means less downtime, more consistency, and better overall execution.
Easy integration
You can manage all of your integrations using a wide variety of languages, frameworks, and libraries to enable greater flexibility, simplifying the integration process.
Faster troubleshooting
The ability to create context-aware workflows powered by metrics, traces, and logs accelerates resolution for performance issues to get your crucial applications back on track faster.
Implementing OpenTelemetry
Follow these steps to use OpenTelemetry and OpenSearch to create a pipeline for comprehensive observability.
| Add instrumentation | Set up instrumentation for your application so it can generate telemetry data and send it to an OpenTelemetry Collector. |
| Set up your collector | Run the OpenTelemetry Collector to receive data from your application and format it into OTel data. |
| Ingest metrics | Deploy OpenSearch Data Prepper to process the OTel data, transform it for use in OpenSearch, and index it on an OpenSearch cluster. |
| Visualize data | Use OpenSearch Dashboards to visualize and detect problems in your distributed applications. |
Get started with OpenSearch
Unlock actionable insights today. Explore our documentation for OpenSearch observability.
