About this episode

Adriana Villela and Josh Lee discuss the complexities of vendor choice in OpenTelemetry and the challenges engineers face in instrumentation.

I still hear people say, “OpenTelemetry is vendor-neutral, so you can switch any time!” In this episode, Adriana Villela and Josh Lee (both active OpenTelemetry contributors) help bust that myth. While OTel standardizes instrumentation and signal transport—and unlocks a rich ecosystem of tools—switching vendors isn’t as simple as it sounds. There’s real cost in retraining engineers, migrating dashboards, SLOs, and alerts, and reworking deep integrations across your delivery pipeline. We also dive into a key challenge the community is tackling: helping engineers instrument by value, not by default—making it easier to capture the right signals with high quality instead of just collecting everything. Here the links we discussed: Adriana's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrianavillela/ Josh's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuamlee/ The blog article: https://thenewstack.io/opentelemetry-vendor-neutrality-guide/ CND Austria Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gxLseuaTdM KCD Prague Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPXG20CXKxQ OpenTelemetry Project Website: https://opentelemetry.io/

People in this episode

Guests: Adriana Villela, Josh Lee

Topics covered

• OpenTelemetry
• vendor neutrality
• signal transport
• instrumentation
• engineering challenges
• data migration

Keywords

• OpenTelemetry
• vendor choice
• instrumentation
• engineering
• data migration
• SLOs
• alerts

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: OpenTelemetry, CND Austria, KCD Prague, The New Stack

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