How to choose an Opentelemetry backend vendor?

Question

With Opentelemetry becoming the new standard of tracing, and it being vendor-agnostic, how do we then choose a backend vendor for opentelemetry?

For example, there are currently many vendors that supports Opentelemetry like GCP Cloudtrace, Datadog, Dynatrace, Lightstep, Instana. How do you choose a vendor for just opentelemtry? Or it doesn't matter at all since opentelemetry is cloud-agnostic and we can just choose the cheapest one to store our traces

Answer 1

Disclosure: I'm a developer at Aspecto.

Some parameters I would consider:

• Cost and plan compared to the scale
• Search capabilities: can I search my traces easily and accurately
• Sampling capabilities
• Works well with my infrastructue
• Supported languages
• Can handle high scale
• Good support, responsive
• Smooth UX, clear visualizations
• Data retention

What qualifies a vendor? (list)
A vendor can be considered "Support OpenTelemetry" or "Implements OpenTelemetry".

Support OpenTelemetry:

The vendor must accept the output of the default SDK through one of two mechanisms:

1. By providing an exporter for the OpenTelemetry Collector and/or the OpenTelemetry SDKs
2. By building a receiver for the OpenTelemetry protocol

Implements OpenTelemetry:

A vendor with a custom SDK implementation will be listed as "Implements OpenTelemetry". If the custom SDK is optional, the vendor can be listed as "Supports OpenTelemetry".

Answer 2

I guess the decision would depend on what you already use (or plan to use) for observability. If nothing, then you would probably want to compare existing solutions by parameters (cost would be one of them) important for your business.