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OpenTelemetry

What OpenTelemetry Solves — and What It Still Leaves to Your Platform

Where OTLP and instrumentation help, and what correlation, storage, and alerting your platform still owns.

AllStak EngineeringApr 11, 20269 min read

OpenTelemetry standardized how telemetry is produced and shipped. It deliberately stops short of storing, correlating, and alerting on that data — which is where your platform comes in.

What OpenTelemetry Solves

OTel gives you vendor-neutral instrumentation and the OTLP wire format. You instrument once and can send traces, metrics, and logs anywhere that speaks OTLP.

What It Leaves to You

OTel doesn't store your data, correlate signals into incidents, evaluate alert rules, or route notifications. Those remain a platform responsibility.

Bring your own instrumentation

AllStak ingests OTLP natively, so existing OpenTelemetry pipelines point at it without re-instrumentation.

A Pragmatic Setup

Use OTel for instrumentation, then let a platform handle storage, correlation, and alerting. You keep portability without rebuilding the backend yourself.

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