Joshua Lee and Adriana Villela are presenting the talk Uncovered: The Hard Truth About OpenTelemetry's Vendor Neutrality at the Cloud Native Days Austria 2025 Conference. The 2025 conference will be held November 7-8.
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.