OTel-Native by Design – Building Products That Export to Any Observability Stack
This article discusses the importance of designing software products to be 'OTel-native' by allowing users to export telemetry data to any OpenTelemetry-compatible backend. It emphasizes avoiding vendor lock-in by supporting standard OTLP protocols for logs, traces, and metrics.
Why it matters
Adopting vendor-neutral observability standards is increasingly critical for SaaS companies to meet enterprise compliance and interoperability requirements.
With contributions from Dan Gomez Blanco (New Relic).
If you're building self-hosted software or a SaaS product, your users will eventually ask to send logs, traces, and metrics to their own observability stack, whether to satisfy compliance, manage costs, or centralize all their observability data in one place.
Locking them into your built-in dashboards or limiting exports to certain vendors creates unnecessary friction. Instead, supporting export to any OpenTelemetry (OTel)-compatible backend is a vendor-neutral, future-proof practice that gives users the freedom to choose their observability stack.
This post outlines how you can design your product so users can export their logs, traces, and metrics to an OTel backend when they want to.
OpenTelemetry defines four signal types, all carried over the standard OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) :
Get smarter about the news
Sign up free for a feed built around what you actually care about, Dive Deeper research on any story, and the full text of every article.
Create free accountAlready have an account? Sign in