OpenTelemetry is a free and open-source software initiative with the objective of supplying software developers with the means to create distributed systems. OpenTelemetry was developed by engineers at Google, and developers have the ability to utilize it to create a standard foundation for the construction of distributed systems. The goal is to enable developers to write code once and then deploy it in any location of their choosing.

It is pretty common to envision software developers spending most of their time writing fancy code, building new, shiny features for applications, and smoothly deploying them to production. However, the reality is usually messier. Things break all the time — your code fails, the system runs out of memory, exceptions go unhandled, dependencies conflict, servers overload, slow requests take forever, and whatnot.