OpenTelemetry
Open SourceSelf-hostableVendor-neutral observability for every stack.
4.85.4K starsAlternative to Datadog, New Relic
Overview
OpenTelemetry is a free, open-source tool and a self-hostable alternative to Datadog, New Relic. It's licensed under Apache 2.0 and written in Go.
OpenTelemetry is a CNCF project that provides a single, open standard for collecting traces, metrics, and logs from any application. It ships SDKs for every major language, a collector daemon you run yourself, and exporters to send data to any backend—Prometheus, Jaeger, Grafana, or your own. You own your telemetry data and are never locked into a vendor.
Why pick OpenTelemetry over Datadog
- Own your data instead of trusting Datadog's servers
- No per-seat pricing — grow without ballooning costs
- OpenTelemetry is open source: audit it, fork it, extend it
- Self-host for full privacy and compliance control
Key features
- Unified SDKs for traces, metrics, and logs in 11+ languages
- OpenTelemetry Collector — a vendor-agnostic pipeline daemon
- Auto-instrumentation for popular frameworks (Express, Spring, Django…)
- Exporters for Prometheus, Jaeger, Zipkin, Grafana LGTM, and 50+ backends
- W3C-standard trace context propagation across services
Pros & cons
Screenshots
Installation
Run the Collector with Docker
docker run -p 4317:4317 -p 4318:4318 otel/opentelemetry-collector-contrib:latestAdd the JS SDK to your app
npm install @opentelemetry/sdk-node @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-nodeFrequently asked questions
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