Comment by mreider

Dynatrace is a leading contributor to the OpenTelemetry project. It supports OTLP traces, metrics, and logs and offers a supported OpenTelemetry Collector distribution with receivers for signals like StatsD and Prometheus. By investing in OpenTelemetry, Dynatrace can focus more on analytics and less on data collection. This is Dynatrace's long-term strategy.

In the short term (at least the next 18 months), data collection decisions remain important, especially for vendors like Dynatrace that provide added value beyond standard trace views, golden signals, alerting, and dashboards. Organizations need to think about these instrumentation choices on a workload-by-workload, and team-by-team basis.

Choosing between OneAgent and OpenTelemetry instrumentation is pretty straightforward. Teams use OpenTelemetry to send observability signals to more than one backend. Teams use OneAgent for its added value, such as deep code-level insights in the context of traces or performance anomalies.

Over time, these decisions will become less critical as data collection becomes more of a commodity.

Full disclosure: I am a Dynatrace Product Manager.