What Is Telemetry Data?
Telemetry is the lifeblood of observability: continuous streams of data that describe system performance, behavior, and interactions. It typically comes in four forms:
- Metrics: Statistical data points (e.g., CPU usage, request counts) that track performance trends
- Events: Asynchronous notifications signaling changes or incidents
- Logs: Recorded actions and their impact, providing context for issues
- Traces: End-to-end records showing how requests travel through connected services
In AWS environments, telemetry volumes are enormous, but raw data alone doesn’t create visibility. The challenge is connecting disparate signals, correlating them with user experience, and making them actionable. That’s where OpenTelemetry comes in.
OpenTelemetry as the “Protocol of Protocols”
In his session, “Open Telemetry: The Future Is Here”, Sascha Giese described OpenTelemetry as a vendor-agnostic, unified framework for generating, collecting, and transmitting telemetry data across metrics, logs, traces, and events.
Why this matters:
- Consistency: OpenTelemetry bridges the fragmented protocols used in applications, infrastructure, and monitoring tools
- Flexibility: It integrates with a wide range of libraries and frameworks, enabling versatile monitoring without vendor lock-in
- Clarity: Standardized data flows mean fewer blind spots in hybrid or multi-cloud environments
"In the past, we had just a handful of protocols, and it worked fine,” explains Sascha. “Now, there are countless technologies, each with its own CLI. Even for a vendor like SolarWinds, implementing all of them into one system is hard. OpenTelemetry is the ‘protocol of protocols’ — it unifies metrics, logs, traces, and events into clean, consistent data."
How SolarWinds Uses OpenTelemetry
Sascha highlighted how SolarWinds has embedded OpenTelemetry into its observability platform, using the OTel Collector for host monitoring, the OTel Collector and Network Collector together for Kubernetes monitoring, and OTel APM Instrumentation Libraries for application performance monitoring. SolarWinds® Observability also includes APM Libraries built on OTel, openly managed under the Apache 2.0 license. This integration allows AWS users to unify AWS-native telemetry with OTel-sourced data, creating a single-pane-of-glass view across hybrid, containerized, and serverless workloads.
Sascha points out: "We’re one of the top 25 contributors to the OpenTelemetry project, and everything we’ve added is available in the open-source framework. It’s about giving back to the community while making observability easier for everyone."
For attendees managing complex, distributed architectures, Sascha’s takeaway was clear: adopting OpenTelemetry is not just about collecting better data. By enabling teams to detect issues before they impact users, correlate telemetry across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, optimize performance without replacing existing systems, and simplify complexity while improving operational resilience, it delivers a stronger, more proactive approach to system health. "Adopting OpenTelemetry is not just about better monitoring,” says Sascha. “It’s about reducing firefighting and building a more proactive, resilient IT operation."
Seeing Clearly in the Cloud
AWS Summit Johannesburg showed that the future of observability is open, integrated, and AI-powered. OpenTelemetry is at the center of that future. For organizations navigating hybrid environments, OTel’s standardization and SolarWinds Platform capabilities make it possible to transform telemetry into the clarity and control IT teams need.
