Today's systems are more complex than ever, yet many companies are locked into observability tools that are slow to evolve and make it nearly impossible to change. Enter OpenTelemetry. As systems grow increasingly complex, the need for effective monitoring and observability has become critical for service assurance, and the tools and approaches we use to understand rapidly changing systems must evolve accordingly.
In our last article, Taming the Observability Cost Crisis, we talked about how the intersection of software complexity and required availability has created unsustainable observability costs for many organizations. pureIntegration’s Unified Observability Platform helps businesses tame this challenge through strategy and enablement centered on open standards-based tooling. Part of this approach relies on OpenTelemetry. But what is OpenTelemetry, and why is it such an important foundation to giving businesses greater visibility and at the same time, independence from commercial monitoring vendors?
The article focuses on several key reasons that OpenTelemetry is a foundation for our approach:
What is OpenTelemetry?
OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework created through the merger of two previous projects: Google’s OpenCensus and Uber’s OpenTracing. It provides a standardized way to collect and export telemetry data—metrics, logs, and traces—from applications and infrastructure. Backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), it has rapidly become the industry standard for instrumentation.
Freedom from Vendor Lock-in
One of the most compelling advantages of adopting open standards like OpenTelemetry is the freedom it provides from vendor lock-in. Implementing a vendor-based observability solution typically means committing to a specific vendor's ecosystem - proprietary agents, formats, and SDKs...and don’t get us started talking about data access! This lock-in often made it prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to switch providers as needs evolved or better solutions emerged.
With OpenTelemetry, the telemetry data format is standardized, meaning you can change your observability backend without changing your instrumentation. This flexibility allows organizations to select the best tools for their current needs while maintaining the option to adapt as those needs change.
Ease of Migration
The OpenTelemetry standardization that allows for back-end decoupling from instrumentation also opens up an interesting path to migration to a fully open solution like Unified Observability Platform. As data flows from an instrumented application, or one of the many ecosystem tools to collected telemetry from other software stack layers, it passes through a collector.
This distributed and scalable collector layer does more than just collect though – it processes, transforms, and exports the telemetry data to the appropriate collection back-end…or back-ends! Because many commercial vendors now support OpenTelemetry data ingestion, this ability to route data to multiple back-ends can be used to ease the migration process to a new platform.
Enhanced Correlation Across Heterogenous Telemetry Types
Modern software systems rarely use a single technology stack. Instead, they often comprise multiple languages, frameworks, and platforms working together. In a traditional approach to observability, each of these components might have its own approach to monitoring, creating silos of observability data that are difficult to correlate.
With pureIntegration’s inclusion of OpenTelemetry at the core of Unified Observability Platform, this challenge is addressed by providing a consistent approach to instrumentation across diverse technology stacks. Whether you're working with Java, Go, Python, .NET, JavaScript, or numerous other languages, OpenTelemetry offers standardized libraries that maintain consistency in how data is collected and structured.
This consistency extends beyond just code instrumentation though. It also allows context to be maintained and correlated across telemetry types. Through a combination of standardized tagging, as well as concepts like exemplars, OpenTelemetry provides a foundation to allow an engineer who is attempting to resolve an issue to quickly and seamlessly jump from an application trace to an associated log message. Also, when a request flows through multiple services, OpenTelemetry ensures that the relevant context (like trace IDs) follows the request, making it possible to understand the complete journey through your system.
Cost Optimization
Implementing and maintaining multiple proprietary monitoring solutions can become expensive, both in terms of direct costs (licenses, infrastructure) and indirect costs (engineering time, training). See Taming the Observability Cost Crisis for more detail! OpenTelemetry, as a core building block of Unified Observability Platform, helps further optimize these costs in multiple ways:
Strategy for Future-Proofing
Technology landscapes change rapidly. When your telemetry data follows a widely-adopted standard, you're better positioned to adopt new technologies as they emerge. You can more easily incorporate ML-powered analytics or predictions, specialized custom monitoring solutions without reinventing your instrumentation layer, or even AI Agents to find patterns or take resolution actions.
Ready to modernize your observability? Discover how OpenTelemetry and Unified Observability Platform combine for unmatched flexibility and control.
Why pureIntegration?
With over 20 years of experience delivering enterprise-scale IT solutions, pureIntegration brings deep technical and strategic expertise to the evolving challenges of modern observability. Our Unified Observability approach is built on a foundation of open standards, scalability, and vendor independence, helping organizations break free from costly, siloed toolsets while gaining richer, correlated insights across their environments.
Having led nearly 2,000 successful engagements, we’ve helped Fortune 500 and service provider clients streamline telemetry, reduce mean time to resolution, and reclaim control over monitoring costs. Our approach balances innovation with practical deployment, resulting in measurable business outcomes and a 97% year-over-year client satisfaction rate.