"Trade isn't about goods. Trade is about information. Goods sit in the warehouse until information moves them.”
C. J. Cherryh
OpenTelemetry is the future of Observability, APM, Monitoring, whatever you want to call ‘the process of knowing what our software is doing.’ It’s becoming common knowledge that your time is better spent gaining experience with an open, standardized system for telemetry than closed-source or otherwise proprietary standard. This truth is so universally acknowledged that all the big players in the market have made announcements of how they’re embracing OpenTelemetry. Often these statements mention how ‘open is the future’ et cetera. But how committed are these teams to OpenTelemetry? In this series, we’ll talk about how native OpenTelemetry tools compare to APM products that have adopted OpenTelemetry only partially. In this article, we will explore how, in both New Relic and Datadog, OpenTelemetry data is a ‘second class citizen.’