Overview

OpenTelemetry is an open source observability framework that provides IT teams with standardized protocols and tools for collecting and routing telemetry data. Created as an incubator project by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), OpenTelemetry provides a consistent format for instrumenting, generating, gathering, and exporting application telemetry data—namely metrics, logs, and traces—to monitoring platforms for analysis and insight.

Setup

To send OpenTelemetry metrics to Datadog, you have two options: the Datadog Agent, or the OpenTelemetry Collector. Using the Datadog Agent enables you to keep using all Agent functionalities. For a more vendor-agnostic setup, use the OpenTelemetry Collector.

If your applications and services are instrumented with OpenTelemetry libraries, you can choose between two paths for getting the metrics data to the Datadog backend:

1. Send metrics to the OpenTelemetry collector, and use the Datadog exporter to forward them to Datadog, or

2. Ingest metrics with the Datadog Agent, which collects them for Datadog.

Read OpenTelemetry for more information.

Out-of-the-box dashboards

Datadog provides out-of-the-box dashboards that you can copy and customize. To use Datadog’s out-of-the-box OpenTelemetry dashboards, go to Dashboards > Dashboards list and search for opentelemetry:

The Host Metrics dashboard is for data collected from the host metrics receiver. The Collector Metrics dashboard is for any other types of metrics collected, depending on which metrics receiver you choose to enable.

Further reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

Learn more about OpenTelemetryDOCUMENTATION Send metrics and traces from OpenTelemetry Collector to Datadog via Datadog ExporterBLOG