Gartner Research

Assessing OpenTelemetry’s Importance to Application Performance Monitoring

Published: 07 June 2023

Summary

OpenTelemetry is being widely adopted by APM vendors; however, organizations are often unsure whether to adopt OpenTelemetry. DevOps and site reliability engineering teams should use this research to understand how and why to implement OTel for APM and for observability in their organizations.

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Overview

Key Findings
  • Despite significant investments in monitoring solutions, organizations need deeper diagnostic data enabling software observability for root cause analysis.

  • OpenTelemetry provides an open, industry-standard method for collecting uniform telemetry data across distributed applications.

  • Most modern application performance monitoring vendors now support OTel for software observability.

  • Many commercial APM tools are making the transition to observability platforms by rearchitecting their solutions for better integration, correlation and analysis of telemetry data.

Recommendations

Infrastructure and operations technical professionals responsible for implementing application monitoring and observability should:

  • Reduce vendor dependence by adopting OTel to instrument distributed applications for analysis.

  • Deliver analysis and visualization across application domains by integrating OTel

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Analysts:

DB Cummings

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