Data sources in the OpenTelemetry open source project

OpenTelemetry is an open-source project that provides a framework for instrumenting, generating, and collecting telemetry data from software applications, focusing on three primary data sources: traces, metrics, and logs. Traces capture details of requests through a system using spans to represent operations, while metrics offer aggregated measurements such as CPU utilization and request duration. Logs provide time-stamped text records in a structured format. The article discusses how developers can use OpenTelemetry's APIs and SDKs to integrate these data sources into their applications, enabling enhanced observability and performance monitoring. Additionally, it highlights the use of the Trace and Metric APIs for adding metadata and configuring collection processes, as well as the strategies available for using log data with OpenTelemetry. The blog post also references upcoming content that will further explore how to instrument applications with OpenTelemetry and send data to backend platforms like New Relic.