Every journey in Observability begins with instrumenting an application to emit telemetry data – primarily logs, metrics and traces – from each service as it executes. OpenTelemetry is an open source project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) that offers a unified framework for generating, collecting and transmitting telemetry data. With OpenTelemetry you can instrument your application in a vendor-agnostic way, and then analyze the telemetry data in your backend tool of choice, whether Prometheus, Jaeger, Zipkin, or others.