Instrument Your Applications

Overview

Datadog supports several approaches for instrumenting your applications with OpenTelemetry. Choose the method that best fits your needs:

OpenTelemetry SDK

You can fully instrument your applications with OpenTelemetry SDKs. These SDKs provide complete implementations for creating traces, metrics, and logs in the OpenTelemetry format, which can then be sent to Datadog.

If you instrument your applications fully with OTel, some Datadog features are not supported. For more information, see the Feature Compatibility table.


OpenTelemetry API and Datadog SDK

Integrating Datadog with OpenTelemetry allows you to use Datadog’s comprehensive observability platform while leveraging OpenTelemetry’s vendor-agnostic instrumentation. This allows you to collect, visualize, and analyze traces from your applications and infrastructure.

Use the OpenTelemetry Tracing APIs with Datadog’s SDK to maintain vendor-neutral instrumentation while accessing Datadog’s full feature set.


OpenTelemetry instrumentation libraries

Extend your observability with OpenTelemetry instrumentation libraries alongside Datadog’s SDK.

Datadog supports OpenTelemetry-compatible instrumentation libraries which provide observability for frameworks and technologies not covered by Datadog’s native SDKs. This allows you to instrument additional frameworks and libraries while still sending data to Datadog’s backend.


Further reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

OpenTelemetry InstrumentationEXTERNAL SITE more more