OpenTelemetry Has a Free Observability Standard — Traces, Metrics, and Logs Without Vendor Lock-in

Datadog costs $23/host/month. New Relic's free tier ends fast. OpenTelemetry sends your data to ANY backend — switch providers without changing your code. What is OpenTelemetry? OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a vendor-neutral observability standard. It provides APIs, SDKs, and a collector for traces, metrics, and logs. Your instrumentation stays the same — only the backend changes. Why OpenTelemetry Is the Standard 1. Instrument Once, Export Anywhere import { NodeSDK } from '@opentelemetry/sdk-node'; import { OTLPTraceExporter } from '@opentelemetry/exporter-trace-otlp-http'; import { getNodeAutoInstrumentations } from '@opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node'; const sdk = new NodeSDK({ traceExporter: new OTLPTraceExporter({ url: 'http://localhost:4318/v1/traces', // Switch backends by changing this URL: // Grafana Tempo, Jaeger, Zipkin, Datadog, Honeycomb, etc. }), instrumentations: [getNodeAutoInstrumentations()], }); sdk.start(); 2. Auto-Instrumentation npm install @opentelemetry/auto-in