Using OpenTelemetry to reduce the web development tooling tax

Web development has evolved significantly from its simpler days of embedding PHP in HTML, largely due to increasing demands for applications to perform complex functions across various devices, which has led to the rise of containerization and distributed architecture managed by tools like Kubernetes. This complexity has also made obtaining telemetry data more challenging, prompting the development of OpenTelemetry (OTel) by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which unified the earlier OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects to provide a vendor-neutral standard for collecting and exporting telemetry data. OpenTelemetry simplifies the integration of metrics and traces across applications, allowing engineers to send data to any backend without needing to learn new API specifications or change dependencies for different vendors. The use of OpenTelemetry reduces cognitive overhead and tooling complexity, as demonstrated by its integration with platforms like New Relic, where engineers can easily configure their applications to export telemetry data using consistent protocols.