KCD Porto 2025 Talk: Uncovered: The Hard Truth About OpenTelemetry’s Vendor Neutrality

CONFERENCE TALK

KCD Porto 2025 Talk: Uncovered: The Hard Truth About OpenTelemetry’s Vendor Neutrality

KCD Porto 2025, the only Kubernetes Community Days in Iberia, brings developers, platform engineers, and cloud specialists together for two days of talks and networking. Supported by CNCF and xgeeks, it’s the largest CNCF event in Portugal, built by the community, for the community—shaping the future of cloud-native tech.

Joshua Lee and Adriana Villela are presenting the talk “Uncovered: The Hard Truth About OpenTelemetry’s Vendor Neutrality”.

We still hear people saying, “OpenTelemetry is vendor neutral so you can switch vendors any time you want to.” This is like saying that because the vCard format exists, it’s easy to switch from iOS to Android. Sure, your core data will ultimately be portable, but you’ll be missing a *lot* of other things.

Does that make vendor neutrality moot? Not at all! Vendor-neutral instrumentation means that all of our code artifacts aren’t impacted by tool changes. Switching vendors won’t be like waving a magic wand, but it will be much easier thanks to OpenTelemetry (OTel). We’ll cover some of the challenges and pitfalls, and offer best practices to make this process as pain-free as possible. We’ll discuss:

• OTel API and SDKs: they ease the pain of total tool switch, but aren’t a magic wand
• The OTel Collector’s simulcast capabilities to multiple tools and how it helps enable vendor “bake-off” evaluations
• The OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP): the best part of OpenTelemetry (hint: vendors used to all have their own exporters, but now most accept OTLP)
• What’s transferable between vendors vs what’s not
• Even the instrumentation isn’t always safe: Structuring your your OTel data to optimize for a vendor

Attendees will come away with an understanding of what OTel vendor neutrality means, so that they can make informed decisions when considering switching to or adopting new tooling.

About the Presenters

Joshua Lee – Open Source Developer Advocate at Altinity

Whether it’s operators or observability, agile or accessibility, his expertise shines because he is passionate about all of it. He’s been building software for more than a decade and he loves sharing experiences via public speaking. He is currently a Developer Advocate for Altinity where he helps create educational content about ClickHouse® and OpenTelemetry, and he is a contributor to the OpenTelemetry project.

Adriana Villela – Principal Developer Advocate at Dynatrace

Adriana Villela is a Principal Developer Advocate, helping companies achieve reliability greatness through Observability, SRE, & DevOps practices. Previously, she managed a Platform Engineering team & an Observability Practices team at Tucows. Adriana has worked at various large-scale enterprises, as an individual contributor and leader, including Bank of Montreal, Ceridian, and Accenture. Adriana is a blogger, host of the Geeking Out Podcast, CNCF Ambassador, and HashiCorp Ambassador.