OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Datadog, Splunk, and ELK. These are all popular tools in observability, monitoring, and logging but serve slightly different purposes:
🔹 OpenTelemetry (OTel)
- What it is: An open-source observability framework for collecting metrics, logs, and traces from applications.
- Purpose: Standardizes how telemetry data is generated and exported.
- Key Points:
- Vendor-neutral (works with Prometheus, Datadog, Splunk, etc.).
- Provides SDKs and APIs in many languages.
- Focus is on data collection, not storage/visualization.
🔹 Prometheus
- What it is: An open-source metrics monitoring system.
- Purpose: Collects time-series metrics (CPU, memory, request rate, etc.) from apps and systems.
- Key Points:
- Uses a pull-based model (scrapes data from exporters).
- Comes with its own query language (PromQL).
- Integrates well with Grafana for dashboards.
- Strong in metrics, but not designed for logs or traces.
🔹 Datadog
- What it is: A commercial SaaS monitoring & observability platform.
- Purpose: Provides full-stack monitoring (metrics, logs, traces, security, APM).
- Key Points:
- Agent-based collection across infrastructure, apps, and cloud services.
- Unified dashboards, anomaly detection, alerting.
- Easy integration with AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, etc.
- Paid solution, but reduces operational overhead compared to managing open-source stacks.
🔹 Splunk
- What it is: A log management and analytics platform.
- Purpose: Indexes, searches, and analyzes machine data (logs, events, metrics).
- Key Points:
- Originally built for log aggregation and searching.
- Powerful search language (SPL – Search Processing Language).
- Expanded into APM, security (SIEM), observability.
- Commercial with high scalability, but can be costly.
🔹 ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana)
- What it is: An open-source stack for log collection, storage, and visualization.
- Components:
- Elasticsearch → Search & analytics engine.
- Logstash → Data ingestion pipeline (collect, parse, transform).
- Kibana → Visualization and dashboards.
- Key Points:
- Often extended with Beats (lightweight shippers).
- Popular for building self-managed log analytics platforms.
- Alternative to Splunk, but requires more maintenance.
🧭 How They Relate
- OpenTelemetry → Collects telemetry data (works with all the others).
- Prometheus → Best for metrics.
- Datadog → All-in-one SaaS observability.
- Splunk → Strong in log analytics and enterprise observability.
- ELK → Open-source log analytics alternative to Splunk.