What is OpenTelemetry?

OpenTelemetry is a vendor-neutral open-source Observability framework for instrumenting, generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry data such as (traces, metrics, logs). As an industry-standard, it is natively supported by a number of vendors, including Lightstep.

For more on OpenTelemetry, please see the official OpenTelemetry docs site.

OpenTelemetry & Lightstep

Lightstep Observability supports OpenTelemetry as the way to get telemetry data (traces, logs, and metrics) from your application as requests travel through its many services and other infrastructure.

Lightstep ingests OpenTelemetry data via the native OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP). OTLP data can be exported to Lightstep either via HTTP or gRPC. You will need to specify which method you wish to use in your code. This document will show you how.

You can send data to Lightstep in one of three ways:

  1. Directly from your application code
  2. To the OpenTelemetry Collector
  3. Through a Lightstep OpenTelemetry Launcher

You can see a list of available Launchers here.