What It Really Takes to Run OpenTelemetry
DevOps.com, Wednesday, August 19th, 2026
OpenTelemetry delivers vendor-neutral instrumentation but carries significant ongoing operational labor.
OpenTelemetry solved the vendor lock-in problem by providing a vendor-neutral way to generate traces, metrics and logs, but teams face substantial hidden costs after initial deployment.
Managing collector sprawl, storage infrastructure, cross-signal correlation and upgrade cycles across services demands continuous engineering effort.
The article weighs self-hosted versus managed platform approaches, noting that platform engineering maturity and compliance requirements determine which strategy fits.