OpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry, often shortened to OTel, is an open source standard and toolkit for collecting telemetry data from software: metrics, logs, and traces. It defines how that data is generated, collected, and exported, regardless of the backend that stores it.
Why a standard for telemetry matters
Before OpenTelemetry, each observability vendor had its own agents and formats. Instrumenting your code tied you to that vendor. Switching meant re-instrumenting everything, which was a powerful form of lock-in.
OpenTelemetry breaks that. You instrument your code once against the open standard, then export the data to whatever backend you choose. If you change backends, your instrumentation stays the same. It has become the industry default, backed by the CNCF.
For teams, the practical win is freedom: the telemetry pipeline and the storage backend are no longer welded together.
How Arc handles OpenTelemetry
Because Arc speaks standard protocols and stores open Parquet, it fits naturally into an OpenTelemetry pipeline as a backend. You instrument once with OTel and keep the freedom to send that data to Arc without re-instrumenting.
Related terms
Arc is a high-performance columnar database. Open Parquet on storage you own, single Go binary, production-ready in 30 seconds.