OpenTelemetry is a vendor-agnostic standard for observability that aims to provide metrics, logs, and traces across implemented languages. It separates instrumentation from downstream storage and query layers, allowing users to decouple them. This enables the use of multiple open-source projects with different instrumentation APIs and ecosystems, simplifying observability data collection and analysis. OpenTelemetry provides a standard API for instrumentation and language SDKs that generate observability data, making it easier to implement and manage observability in applications. The library also supports auto-instrumentation, which automatically generates spans and attributes without requiring code changes, providing best practices for frameworks and removing downstream concerns from observability generation. With OpenTelemetry, users can mix manual and automatic instrumentation as needed, combining them to suit their specific use cases. Additionally, OpenTelemetry provides support for exceptions, including error events with stack traces, making it easier to diagnose issues in distributed systems. Overall, OpenTelemetry is a powerful tool for implementing observability in applications, providing flexibility, scalability, and ease of use.