Five Ways to Use OpenTelemetry Beyond Observability

OpenTelemetry’s widespread adoption as an observability standard has also encouraged its use for purposes beyond traditional traces, metrics, and logs, including general data pipelines, infrastructure inventory, routing and experimentation, billing metering, and storing application payloads. Its Collector is increasingly used to transform and route security, audit, and compliance data, but its backpressure behavior can drop records, making external durable queues necessary for data requiring completeness. Entity events can support live infrastructure inventories, although at-least-once delivery introduces duplicates and ordering challenges, while baggage can propagate tenant, experiment, or routing information but has size limits, may silently discard entries, and can expose data across trust boundaries. Usage metrics may support billing workflows, but duplicate delivery requires separately implemented idempotency, reconciliation, and auditing. Adding request bodies, SQL, or generative AI prompts to spans is convenient but can exceed attribute limits, create high-cardinality costs, and transmit sensitive information to telemetry systems. The text recommends assessing whether data can tolerate loss, has bounded cardinality, and crosses trust boundaries before sending it through OpenTelemetry, while using dedicated traffic capture tools when full request and response replay is needed.

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