KloudMate

New Relic

Prometheus

Grafana

Chronosphere

Top 7 Observability Platforms With OpenTelemetry Support in 2024

Aug 28, 2024

Observability is essential for understanding the performance and health of modern applications, especially as systems grow in complexity. OpenTelemetry, an open-source based observability framework and toolkit, has been widely adopted for its ability to standardize and provide high-quality telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces). This enables developers to effectively monitor their applications and troubleshoot issues.

In this article, we explore some of the top 8 observability backends that seamlessly integrate with OpenTelemetry, offering robust solutions for managing complex software and infrastructure environments.


What is OpenTelemetry?


OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework that offers a standardized method for gathering, processing, and exporting telemetry data from applications.

It simplifies and streamlines the process of code instrumentation and the collection of observability data, such as metrics, logs, and traces, across various programming languages, frameworks, and infrastructures.


Why does OpenTelemetry need a backend?

The OpenTelemetry framework is designed to gather telemetry data from applications, such as traces, logs, and metrics, but does not have functionalities for data storage and analysis.

Therefore, OpenTelemetry needs a backend system to handle the storage, processing, analysis, and visualization of the collected data. This backend is essential in the observability pipeline, providing the means to derive insights and take requisite action, based on the telemetry data.

The backend platform acts as the central repository and processing unit for the telemetry data gathered via OpenTelemetry. It enables the collection, analysis, visualization, and interpretation of the telemetry data generated by your applications.


How to choose the backend suitable for your monitoring needs?


There are several observability backends that support OpenTelemetry as a data source, and help achieve different monitoring use-cases.

Some of them like Jaeger, Zipkin, Uptrace etc. specialize in distributed tracing, while there are others that focus on metrics visualization, or logs management and analysis, respectively.

In this article, we focus on Observability tools that offer comprehensive processing and analysis of all the signals of observability.


Here Are the Top 7 Observability Backends with OpenTelemetry support

  • KloudMate

  • Dynatrace

  • Datadog

  • New Relic

  • Prometheus

  • Grafana

  • Chronosphere

1. KloudMate

KloudMate is an OpenTelemetry-first, unified APM and Observability platform for monitoring of complex infrastructure, microservices and distributed applications. It is purpose-built for modern engineering teams, who can create metric dashboards, analyze logs, trace requests (APIs, function calls, request paths, database queries, etc…), monitor errors, set up alarms and get insightful metrics on the performance of their applications.

KloudMate simplifies the process of correlating data from the 4 signals of Observability, viz. Metrics, Events, Logs and Traces, thereby making it easier to implement, manage and use an observability system, unifying the whole experience.

Key features:

  • Full-suite, comprehensive observability suite, that covers all aspects of infrastructure and application monitoring

  • In-built Incident Management suite, negating the need to integrate PagerDuty, Zenduty, OpsGenie, or other similar tools

  • Real-User Monitoring (RUM) to monitor web vitals and crucial end user experiences, correlated with backend performance

  • Workspace-based workflow allows adding multiple workloads, teams and users, ensuring seamless data management

  • Collaborative issue tracking and resolving

  • Upcoming AI-powered Observability

2. Dynatrace

Dynatrace offers extensive observability capabilities that fully support OpenTelemetry, allowing users to import OpenTelemetry data across several telemetry types without altering existing instrumentation. Some of the key features of Dynatrace include:

  • Advanced AI engine (Davis) for anomaly detection and root cause analysis

  • PurePath technology for deep insights and end-to-end transaction tracing

  • Automated deployment and updates for easy setup

  • Seamless integration with cloud-native environments

3. Datadog

Datadog, the pioneer in the APM space, offers a comprehensive observability suite that is industry leading, and (while they have their own SDKs), also support OpenTelemetry natively, allowing users to send their Telemetry data directly to the platform for visualization and analysis alongside other collected data.

It is often seen as one of the most expensive observability solutions in the market.

Here are some features (not limited to):

  • User-friendly interface with powerful analytics tools

  • Correlation of data from multiple sources for a holistic view

  • Customizable dashboards and alerting features

  • Search, Data Analysis, and Query functionalities

  • Seamlessly integrates with major cloud providers and container orchestration tools

  • Real-user Monitoring, Synthetic Monitoring (RUM)

  • Continuous profiler

4. New Relic

Apart from being a leading full-stack monitoring platform, New Relic fully embraces OpenTelemetry, allowing users to send telemetry data directly into New Relic One. It is known for its sophisticated querying capabilities and real-time analytics engine.

Key features of New Relic include:

  • Flexible instrumentation and unified telemetry data view

  • Advanced querying capabilities for in-depth analysis

  • Real-time monitoring with customizable alerts

  • Robust integration with various development and operational tools

  • 5. Prometheus

Prometheus is a widely-used open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit that integrates well with OpenTelemetry, providing powerful metrics collection and querying capabilities.

It is particularly known for its robust time-series database and flexible query language, making it a go-to choice for monitoring dynamic environments.

Key features:

  • Highly efficient time-series database for storing metrics

  • Strong query language (PromQL) for real-time data analysis

  • Built-in alerting mechanism with flexible configuration options

  • Easy integration with Kubernetes and other container orchestration systems

6. Grafana

Grafana is arguably the most popular open-source platform for monitoring and observability, known for its powerful data visualization capabilities and seamless integration with OpenTelemetry.

It enables users to create and share dynamic dashboards with ease, offering extensive support for various data sources to build one’s own comprehensive monitoring solutions.

Features:

  • Highly customizable and interactive dashboards

  • Wide range of data source support, including Prometheus and Elasticsearch

  • Built-in alerting with multiple notification channels

  • One of the most extensive plugin ecosystems and communities in the industry

7. Chronosphere

Chronosphere is a cloud-native observability platform designed to handle massive scale and integrates seamlessly with OpenTelemetry. It offers advanced monitoring and alerting capabilities tailored for dynamic environments.

Chronosphere provides teams with the tools to maintain visibility and control over complex, distributed systems.

Key features of Chronosphere include:

  • Scalable search and analytics engine for large-scale data

  • Integrated Kibana platform for visualization and dashboard creation

  • Advanced querying and filtering capabilities

  • Strong support for distributed architectures and high availability

Conclusion

Each of these platforms offer unique strengths in handling OpenTelemetry data, with features catering to different aspects of observability. The choice of an observability platform may depend on specific business needs, existing infrastructure, and budget considerations. As OpenTelemetry continues to evolve, these platforms are likely to provide even more integration features, enhancing their observability capabilities and helping organizations maintain high-performing, reliable applications.

KloudMate offers the simplest pricing structure in the market, based solely on the volume of logs ingested into the platform—no host-based, user-based, or account-based charges.

Click here to sign up for a free account and get started in minutes.

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