Observability by OpenTelemetry
Last updated: 20 June 2025
Observability is essential for understanding how systems behave and perform. As architectures become more distributed, having a common framework with end-to-end visibility becomes critical to maintaining system health, reliability and service levels.
Solution
OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a framework that standardised how telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces) are collected and exported to back-end platforms. It provides a consistent instrumentation format across all services and programming languages.
By offering a vendor-neutral approach, OpenTelemetry enables the Home Office to evaluate and switch between monitoring solutions more easily and cost-effectively. It empowers cross-functional teams to maintain reliable, consistent observability across diverse systems.
Benefits
- Instrument once, send anywhere — Write your telemetry code once and export it to any observability backend.
- Standardised tooling — SDKs are available for most modern languages. Vendors are standardising on publishing observability data for their applications and frameworks using open telemetry standards.
- Unified telemetry — Collect metrics, logs, and traces in a connected, structured format for better insight and correlation.
Considerations
- For new services, start designing OTel instrumentation early in the development lifecycle. Define clear naming conventions and semantic standards upfront to ensure consistent observability data across your teams and systems.
- For existing services migrating to OTel, adopt a gradual, incremental rollout. This approach helps validate telemetry accuracy and monitor any impact on system performance before completing the full transition.