Tools for trying out OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework that can be daunting to instrument services with, but various tools are available to try it out without investing significant time in documentation. The otel-cli tool allows users to send OpenTelemetry traces to a collector or New Relic from the command line, enabling quick distributed tracing and adding tracing to shell scripts. telemetrygen is another utility that simulates a client generating traces, metrics, and logs, providing a basic way to see OpenTelemetry data without needing an application. The OpenTelemetry Community demo application offers a real-world example of a distributed system instrumented by OpenTelemetry, allowing users to view instrumentation examples, modify configuration files, and understand generated data. Additionally, New Relic provides examples in several languages for hands-on experimentation with OpenTelemetry instrumentation.