OpenTelemetry 101 - A Practical Guide to Unified Observability

Modern systems are more complex than ever—spanning cloud, containers, and microservices. When something breaks, traditional monitoring tools often fall short.

They might tell you something is wrong, but they won’t tell you why.

This is where observability comes in—helping teams move beyond basic uptime checks to truly understand system behavior using telemetry data (logs, metrics and traces).

But here’s the challenge:

• Logs, metrics, and traces are often siloed across different tools.
• Vendor lock-in makes it difficult to switch platforms.
• Lack of standardization slows down troubleshooting production issues and cost analysis.

Enter OpenTelemetry (OTel)—an open-source, vendor-neutral observability framework that standardizes telemetry collection across any stack.

With OTel, you can instrument once and send data anywhere—whether it’s Prometheus, Jaeger, or a custom backend.

What you'll Learn in This Guide:

? Why OpenTelemetry is essential for modern engineering teams

? The core components of OpenTelemetry: SDKs, OTel Collector, and OTLP

? Hands-on guide to instrumenting a real-world microservice

Observability shouldn’t be locked behind proprietary tools. With OpenTelemetry, your telemetry data remains open, portable, and vendor-neutral—giving you full control over how and where it's used.

?? Read the full guide here: https://www.randoli.io/blog-post/opentelemetry-101-a-practical-guide-to-unified-observability