Core components of the OpenTelemetry open source project
Blog post from New Relic
The OpenTelemetry project is an open source initiative that provides a set of components for instrumentation and observability, including APIs, SDKs, tools, specifications, and semantic conventions. The API allows application developers to instrument their code to generate telemetry data, while the SDK provides an implementation of the API for popular programming languages. The OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) defines the encoding of telemetry data and specifies how it is exchanged between client and server. Semantic conventions enable consistent operations across different platforms and languages. The OpenTelemetry Collector serves as a central repository to receive, process, and export telemetry data, supporting various formats and exporting data to backend observability tools. Exporters translate telemetry data to the required format for transmission to the destination system.