The data is there, but it’s scattered across domains, formats, and vendors. Teams are often left piecing together an incomplete story of what went wrong, long after the damage has been done.
Now, a new open standard is changing that. OpenTelemetry (OTel) is fast becoming the connective tissue of modern observability—an open-source framework designed to make telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces) universally accessible. Its impact on APM is profound, redefining how teams monitor performance, diagnose issues, and collaborate across systems. With its rapid adoption across the software ecosystem, OTel is doing for observability what open APIs once did for integration, creating a shared language for insight. Let’s explore how.
The Modern APM Dilemma
Organizations have never had more data and less clarity. Each monitoring tool offers its own lens on performance, but these lenses rarely align. A single application might generate telemetry from dozens of sources: backend services, front-end APIs, network nodes, and databases. Stitching that story together is a manual, error-prone process that slows response times and burdens teams.
The result is that more monitoring doesn’t always lead to a deeper understanding. In practice, this fragmentation leads to duplicate dashboards, competing narratives, and tool fatigue. It also fuels stress for developers and site reliability engineers who are responsible for uptime but lack a comprehensive view. The friction between data silos and distributed responsibility is now one of the main barriers to improving digital experience. When insight is fragmented, collaboration suffers, and decisions become reactive rather than informed.
Enter OpenTelemetry: A Common Language for Performance
OpenTelemetry began as a community effort to solve one of the industry’s biggest headaches—how to collect and correlate performance data without locking teams into proprietary ecosystems. Supported by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), OTel provides a unified set of APIs, libraries, and agents that make it possible to gather telemetry from virtually any source, in a standard format, and send it to any observability platform.
The result is a framework that encourages openness and flexibility. Teams can combine data from multiple environments—public cloud, on-prem, or edge—without sacrificing fidelity or control. This doesn’t just streamline operations; it redefines collaboration. When everyone is looking at the same signals, patterns emerge faster, and accountability becomes shared rather than siloed.
Key advantages of OTel include:
- Universal compatibility, integrating with countless languages, frameworks, and infrastructures
- Richer insight, combining traces, logs, and metrics in one schema for full-stack visibility
- Community-driven innovation, where contributors continually expand coverage and support
EMA’s recent report, Taking Observability to the Next Level: OpenTelemetry’s Emerging Role in IT Performance and Reliability, describes this shift as “a turning point” for performance monitoring, where openness enables not only better technology but also better teamwork.
From Telemetry to Insight
Collecting data is only half the challenge; making it meaningful is where true observability begins. OTel provides the foundation for unified data, but enterprises still need platforms that can correlate that information across services, contextualize performance within the business, and transform raw telemetry into decisions. This is where the evolution from traditional monitoring to holistic observability begins to take shape.
When teams can view all telemetry through a single pane of glass, the benefits compound; they gain visibility across dependencies, performance bottlenecks, and user experiences in real time. A slowdown in an API call can be traced directly to an infrastructure issue, and remediation can begin before customers even notice. Over time, this level of connected insight reduces mean time to resolution (MTTR) and builds confidence in the reliability of critical systems.
Most importantly, it restores balance. Instead of engineers being consumed by alert noise and fragmented dashboards, they can return to what matters—solving problems creatively, optimizing performance, and improving experience for users and customers alike.
Unifying Observability with SolarWinds
At SolarWinds, we see OpenTelemetry as foundational to the next era of observability. SolarWinds has been a top contributor to the CNCF and primarily through our OpenTelemetry contributions. Our cloud-native platform, SolarWinds® Observability SaaS, is built to take full advantage of OTel’s promise. By natively supporting OpenTelemetry data, SolarWinds helps teams ingest, enrich, and analyze telemetry from any environment within a single, intuitive interface. Our OTel agent brings in everything you can get and more. We provide additional attributes that you can’t get with standard OTel.
This unified approach transforms monitoring into understanding. Rather than chasing isolated alerts, teams can track complete application journeys across systems and correlate performance data directly with user impact. By turning OTel’s open data into context-rich insight, SolarWinds Observability bridges the gap between raw signals and operational clarity. The outcome? Simpler workflows, more intelligent automation, and faster time to resolution across the stack. For organizations seeking to modernize their APM strategy, it’s a way to move from observation to action—anchored by the openness of OpenTelemetry and the analytical power of SolarWinds Observability. Add our forthcoming agentic AI experience to the equation, and the IT pros we serve will have more control over their environments than ever before.
The Future of APM Is Open
OpenTelemetry is more than a technical specification; it’s a cultural shift toward openness, interoperability, and shared accountability. EMA’s research underscores this point: organizations adopting OTel-based observability aren’t just collecting data—they’re building the connective tissue for continuous improvement. As the standard matures, its influence will extend beyond application performance to touch every layer of IT reliability. For developers and SREs, it means fewer blind spots and better collaboration. For IT leaders, it means improved uptime, predictability, and confidence in decision-making. And for the industry, it signals a new paradigm: one where performance management is no longer defined by tools, but by the clarity and control they provide.
To explore EMA’s full analysis of OpenTelemetry’s impact, and see how SolarWinds Observability is helping organizations bring these insights to life, download the whitepaper or watch the on-demand webcast today.
