OpenTelemetry Observability AI Skill Guide

Overview

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a vendor-neutral standard for traces, metrics, and logs. Applications use language SDKs/APIs; the OpenTelemetry Collector receives, processes, and exports telemetry to backends (Jaeger, Prometheus, cloud APM). Agents should prioritize correct context propagation and low-cardinality attributes over dumping every field into spans.

App SDK (traces/metrics/logs)
        |
        | OTLP
        v
OTel Collector (receivers -> processors -> exporters)
        |
        +--> Tempo/Jaeger (traces)
        +--> Prometheus/Mimir (metrics)
        +--> Loki/ELK (logs)

When to use