OpenTelemetry
Browse all articles, tutorials, and guides about OpenTelemetry
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OpenTelemetry Collector Custom Builds: 6.5x Smaller, and What Resource Detectors Cost at Startup
We built a small Collector with ocb and started it next to the contrib release on a droplet, in two network namespaces and on a Raspberry Pi, 5 times per case. The custom build is 6.5x smaller and holds under a quarter of the memory. Cloud detectors for clouds the host is not on held startup for the full 5 s timeout, even on another cloud, and one detector stopped the Collector from starting at all.
Datadog Alternatives in 2026: 12 Tools, Their Real Prices, and What 300 GB of Logs Costs on Each
We read the pricing page of Datadog and 12 alternatives on the same day and priced one workload on each: 300 GB of logs a month. Datadog with standard indexing of every event is $780 to $1,155 a month; the alternatives we could price run from about $19 to $180. Here is each tool, who it suits, and the catch on its pricing page.
Knowing What Your AI Feature Costs Before Finance Does
The model invoice has one line per model, and finance wants one line per feature. We ran three features on one key and recorded every usage block: a one-word alert label cost a third to a half of a full incident investigation, because of reasoning tokens nobody reads. Here is how to measure that per request and tag it per feature.
Your Trace Dies the Moment the Pipeline Shells Out
OpenTelemetry has a Release Candidate spec for passing trace context through environment variables, which is how you connect a CI run to the build tool it spawns. Two runnable demos: one showing four orphaned traces becoming one, and one showing why BAGGAGE across a trust boundary is the part worth arguing about.
OpenTelemetry Just Graduated: What to Retire from Your Stack This Quarter
On May 21, 2026, CNCF graduated OpenTelemetry. All three core signals (traces, metrics, logs) are now production-ready, the project is the second-most-active in CNCF after Kubernetes itself, and Anthropic, Bloomberg, Capital One, eBay, and Heroku run it at scale. Here is the decision framework for what proprietary agents you can stop running, what is still risky, and the 90-day adoption checklist.
Distributed Tracing with OpenTelemetry: From Instrumentation to Visualization
A walkthrough of instrumenting a real service with OpenTelemetry, running the Collector, and finding the slow span in Jaeger when a request hops across five microservices.