Top OpenTelemetry Observability Tools in 2024

OpenTelemetry—Most observability tools already support this open standard, and more are joining the trend.

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Some are going a step further and making it the ONLY standard for their observability tasks.

If you are wondering why?

Here is the list of benefits observability tools can offer by adopting OTEL

• Holistic view – OTEL makes it easier for observability tools to offer this feature
• End-to-end visibility – OTEL also makes this easier.
• Data Ownership – No more vendor lock-ins, you can take your data to other tools.
• Pluggable architecture – Plug and play makes it easy
• Widely used: It’s becoming the standard; not using it means falling behind.

In short, OTEL makes observability effective and more accessible. It addresses all the important challenges of observability with open standards, community support, and comprehensive data collection capabilities.

So, which observability tools are making the most of this open standard?

Let’s check the:

8 Best OpenTelemetry Observability Tools for 2024

1. Edge Delta

Amongst its performance-enhancing and cost-cutting features, the addition of Edge Delta’s alignment with OTel principles makes it the best OTel Observability tool for organizations aiming to leverage OpenTelemetry for comprehensive observability.

It standardizes on the OTel schema for logging, ensuring that log data is automatically formatted in this schema with no additional effort required from users.

By automating the structuring of logs in the OTel schema, Edge Delta eliminates the need for manual intervention, thereby enabling organizations to avoid vendor lock-in and simplifying the investigation of log data. This capability is crucial for organizations navigating the complexities of implementing OTel, particularly when dealing with intricate codebases or infrastructures and ensuring compatibility with existing tools.

Key Features:

• Cost Optimization: It offers a unique approach to observability by utilizing the power of federated learning and distributed analytics to analyze data directly at the source. This method significantly reduces latency, bandwidth usage, and costs associated with traditional centralized data processing.
• Automated Anomaly Detection: Uses advanced algorithms to automate anomaly detection.
• OpenTelemetry Integration: Supports seamless metrics, logs, and trace collection via OpenTelemetry.
• Real-Time Insights: Offers real-time insights with intuitive dashboards for quick decision-making.

2. New Relic

New Relic offers a set of tools and integrations for OpenTelemetry, making it one of the top OpenTelemetry observability tools. The platform simplifies the integration of telemetry data across metrics, logs, and traces from any source, enabling teams to connect and troubleshoot faster.

With native support for OpenTelemetry, New Relic allows for quick integration and flexible instrumentation, ensuring that data from various sources can be easily ingested and analyzed on a single platform. This approach not only supports the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) traffic over gRPC and HTTP/1.1 but also facilitates managed tail-based sampling with New Relic Infinite Tracing.

New Relic’s commitment to OpenTelemetry extends to enriching logs using the OpenTelemetry Collector, which is a powerful tool for transforming and enriching telemetry data before it reaches the observability backend. This process enhances the observability and monitoring of modern systems by providing deeper insights and context to logs, making it easier to troubleshoot issues and understand system behavior.

Key Features:

• Full-Stack Observability: Offers end-to-end visibility across applications and infrastructure.
• Intuitive Dashboards: Customizable dashboards and visualization tools.
• Alerting and Incident Management: Real-time alerts and streamlined incident management workflows.

3. Datadog

Datadog, with a goal to be the best observability platform for OpenTelemetry, is actively contributing to OTel development and improving OTel support within its ecosystem.

By integrating support for the OpenTelemetry Collector, facilitating OTLP data ingestion, and offering AWS Lambda integration, Datadog significantly streamlines the process of telemetry data collection, analysis, and visualization. This comprehensive approach not only simplifies observability but also ensures continuous visibility across various setups without necessitating changes to existing configurations.

Furthermore, Datadog’s strategic partnership with AWS significantly boosts serverless monitoring capabilities, allowing for the efficient collection of OpenTelemetry traces that enable in-depth analysis. This collaboration underscores Datadog’s commitment to enhancing serverless application observability. Additionally, by correlating Real User Monitoring (RUM) events with OpenTelemetry traces, Datadog advances issue resolution and enriches user experience insights across the entire technology stack.

These efforts collectively emphasize Datadog’s contribution and commitment to OpenTelemetry’s growth and its belief in the importance of OpenTelemetry for the future of observability.

Key Features:

• Unified Observability: Single platform for logs, metrics, and traces.
• Auto-Instrumentation: Simplifies OpenTelemetry integration.
• AI-Powered Anomaly Detection: Proactively identifies issues using machine learning.

4. Splunk

Splunk has been synonymous with powerful data analytics and operational intelligence for a long time. With its embrace of OpenTelemetry, Splunk enhances its capabilities for ingestion, processing, and visualization of telemetry data from many sources. The platform also provides a composite picture of how systems behave and empowers teams to use telemetry data to make informed decisions and analyze root causes.

Splunk’s initiatives to support OpenTelemetry include the creation of instrumentation libraries and SDKs for various programming languages, enabling automatic trace instrumentation and easy configuration. This support allows users to capture comprehensive telemetry data across their entire stack, from applications to infrastructure, without the need for code modifications.

By leveraging OpenTelemetry’s vendor-neutral standards, Splunk empowers organizations to maintain flexibility in their observability tools while benefiting from Splunk’s powerful analytics and visualization capabilities.

Alt tag: Splunk Observability Cloud UI

Source: Splunk

Key Features:

• Real-Time Monitoring: Offers immediate insights into applications and services.
• Smart Analytics: Machine learning-driven insights for reduced alert fatigue.
• IaC Integration: Supports Infrastructure as Code tools for automated instrumentation.

5. Elastic

Elastic, best known for the Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana (ELK) stack, provides an excellent foundation for searching, analyzing, and visualizing real-time data. With native OpenTelemetry support in Elastic Observability, it has streamlined the process of ingesting telemetry data, including metrics, logs, and traces, directly into the Elastic Stack.

Elastic’s Elastic Common Schema (ECS) for OTel makes sure that data ingested via OpenTelemetry is structured and maximizes compatibility and analysis within the Elastic Stack. This approach simplifies the correlation of data across different sources and types, providing a unified view of an organization’s operational health.

Elastic has also developed specific solutions for auto-instrumenting Node.js applications with OpenTelemetry, demonstrating its dedication to easing the instrumentation process for developers. Through these efforts, Elastic not only supports the broader adoption of OpenTelemetry but also ensures that its users can fully exploit the benefits of open standards for observability.

Key Features:

• Elasticsearch Backend: Efficient log and trace data handling.
• Kibana Dashboards: Customizable monitoring dashboards.
• Machine Learning: Anomaly detection and trend analysis.

6. Dynatrace

Dynatrace.com, with a dedicated team working on OTel, offers native support for OpenTelemetry. This allows users to unify metrics, traces, and logs in one integrated platform. This integration facilitates the execution of queries across diverse data types, enhancing the value of OpenTelemetry data within the Dynatrace environment.

Dynatrace’s contributions to OpenTelemetry include significant advancements such as the integration of PurePath 4 technology, which extends automatic distributed tracing to OpenTelemetry and the latest cloud-native technologies. This integration provides precise and actionable analytics across the software lifecycle in heterogeneous cloud-native environments.

Through its comprehensive support for OpenTelemetry, including service mesh and serverless applications, Dynatrace enhances visibility, facilitates collaboration across teams, and enables organizations to scale their observability practices efficiently.

Key Features:

• AI-Powered Smartscape: Automatic mapping of application ecosystems.
• Smart Alerting: AI-driven insights for actionable alerts.
• Session Replay: The platform has user-centric monitoring capabilities.

7. ServiceNow Cloud Observability

ServiceNow Cloud Observability, formerly Lightstep, provides observability for microservices and distributed systems, focusing on distributed tracing.

With its comprehensive support for OpenTelemetry, ServiceNow allows developers to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data for in-depth analysis. The platform’s integration with OpenTelemetry eliminates the need for vendor-specific integrations, making it simpler than ever to capture observability data using an open-source framework.

ServiceNow offers OpenTelemetry Service Mapping, which automatically discovers and maps cloud-native apps, inferred services, and Kubernetes objects. With this feature DevOps can deploy a Kubernetes-native OpenTelemetry framework without the need for servers or proprietary agents, creating topology maps for hybrid environments. It helps identify relationships between services and infrastructure, thereby reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) and improving change impact analysis. By automating the discovery of cloud-native apps and Kubernetes objects using telemetry data, ServiceNow improves cross-system visibility and automatically correlates alerts to discovered configuration items, facilitating faster problem identification and resolution.

Key Features:

• Distributed Tracing: Detailed tracing across microservices.
• Root Cause Analysis: Simplifies issue identification and resolution.
• Change Intelligence: Insights on code changes’ impact on performance.

 8. Honeycomb

Honeycomb’s advocacy for OpenTelemetry is rooted in its belief that OpenTelemetry, as a CNCF open standard, is the most effective way to ingest high-cardinality and high-dimensional data necessary for observability.

Honeycomb’s integration with the OpenTelemetry Collector simplifies the collection and export of telemetry data, making it an optional but powerful component in users’ observability stacks. By supporting direct ingestion of telemetry data via OpenTelemetry’s native protocol (OTLP) and offering guidance on setting up the OpenTelemetry Collector for frontend monitoring, Honeycomb enables users to achieve comprehensive observability across their applications.

Honeycomb.io’s all-in approach to OpenTelemetry, combined with its contributions to the community and its focus on practical implementation, makes it the best tool for OpenTelemetry observability.

Key Features:

• High-Cardinality Queries: Handles complex queries for precise debugging.
• Distributed Tracing: Comprehensive tracing capabilities.
• Collaborative Debugging: Enhances team-based issue resolution.

OpenTelemetry Basics: Definition and History

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is an open-source collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs designed for generating, managing, and exporting telemetry data. As a vendor-agnostic platform, it supports many kinds of observability backends.

Born by merging the codebases of OpenTracing and OpenCensus under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), OpenTelemetry standardizes how telemetry data is collected to guarantee flexibility and avoid lock-ins by any specific vendor.

OTel helps organizations collect telemetry data such as logs, metrics, and traces. These telemetry data go through observability platforms to be analyzed, stored, or visualized.

Before diving into observability with OpenTelemetry, here are some important terms to remember:

OpenTelemetry proves to be an excellent solution for observability because it supports vendor-agnostic tools and APIs. Being able to support different platforms is also why many observability tools embrace the power of OpenTelemetry nowadays.

Choosing the Best OpenTelemetry Observability Tools

There are various factors to consider when choosing the best OpenTelemetry Observability tools, such as:

• Integration Capabilities: Ensure the tool offers seamless integration with OpenTelemetry for comprehensive data collection, including metrics, logs, and traces. This enables better insights and easier instrumentation across various platforms.
• Scalability: The tool should scale with your infrastructure, handling large volumes of data and growing services without compromising performance.
• Cost-Effectiveness: Evaluate the tool’s pricing model to ensure it aligns with your budget. Open-source options can be cost-effective, especially for smaller teams or those with budget constraints.
• User Interface and Experience: A user-friendly interface enhances collaboration and decision-making within your team. Consider tools that offer intuitive dashboards and easy navigation.
• Advanced Analytics: The tool should provide in-depth analytics capabilities to identify performance bottlenecks, understand user behavior, and improve system reliability.
• Comprehensive Monitoring: Look for tools that offer a blend of log management, application performance management (APM), and real-time monitoring to ensure a holistic view of your system.
• Community Support and Documentation: Strong community support and well-maintained documentation can significantly ease the implementation process and troubleshooting.
• Platform Development Support: Ensure the observability tool supports your development platforms to guarantee visibility across all system components.

By carefully considering these factors and aligning them with your specific needs, you can select an observability tool that integrates well with OpenTelemetry and enhances your system’s observability and reliability.

Disclaimer: This article is part of sponsored content programme. The Tribune is not responsible for the content including the data in the text and has no role in its selection.