Beyond the SDK: The Hidden Labor and Evolving Architecture of OpenTelemetry Deployments
EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW For years, the application performance monitoring (APM) market was defined by vendor lock-in. Engineering teams seeking deep visibility into distributed systems were forced to integrate proprietary agents deeply into their codebase. Switching APM vendors required a monumental, high-risk re-instrumentation effort, effectively binding an organization’s operational insights to a single commercial ecosystem. The advent…