Comment by reactordev

Not confusing anything. Yes you can meter your own applications, generate your own metrics, but most organizations start their observability journey with the hardware and latency metrics.

Otel provides a means to sugar any metric with labels and attributes which is great (until you have high cardinality) but there are still things that are at the infrastructure level that only CloudWatch knows of (on AWS). If you’re running K8s on your own hardware - Otel would be my first choice.