OpenTelemetry Has a Free Observability Standard — Traces, Metrics, and Logs Without Vendor Lock-in

Datadog costs $23/host/month. New Relic's free tier ends fast. OpenTelemetry sends your data to ANY backend — switch providers without changing your code. What is OpenTelemetry? OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a vendor-neutral observability standard. It provides APIs, SDKs, and a collector for traces, metrics, and logs. Your instrumentation stays the same — only the backend changes. Why OpenTelemetry Is the Standard 1. Instrument Once, Export Anywhere import { NodeSDK } from ' @opentelemetry/sdk-node ' ; import { OTLPTraceExporter } from ' @opentelemetry/exporter-trace-otlp-http ' ; import { getNodeAutoInstrumentations } from ' @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node ' ; const sdk = new NodeSDK ({ traceExporter : new OTLPTraceExporter ({ url : ' http://localhost:4318/v1/traces ' , // Switch backends by changing this URL: // Grafana Tempo, Jaeger, Zipkin, Datadog, Honeycomb, etc. }), instrumentations : [ getNodeAutoInstrumentations ()], }); sdk . start (); 2. Auto-Instrumentation npm install