13 Best OpenTelemetry Tools in 2024

Imagine launching your app only to encounter performance bottlenecks or elusive errors that went unnoticed. OpenTelemetry provides a standardized approach to collecting essential telemetry data—spanning metrics, traces, and logs—from your application.

However, capturing data is only the first step. You need a reliable backend to process, analyze, and visualize this information to gain meaningful insights and maintain optimal performance. With so many options, choosing the right OpenTelemetry backend can feel daunting.

This article compiles the top 10 OpenTelemetry backend tools designed to simplify observability.

Why use an OpenTelemetry backend tool?

You gain access to rich telemetry data when you instrument your app with OpenTelemetry. However, without a backend to ingest, store, and analyze it, this data is like scattered puzzle pieces without a reference image.

OpenTelemetry backend tools provide a centralized platform to process distributed traces, logs, and metrics. These tools deliver actionable insights, helping you identify performance bottlenecks, uncover root causes, and monitor the health of your entire stack in real-time.

Factors to consider when choosing an OpenTelemetry tool

Choosing the proper OpenTelemetry backend doesn’t have to be overwhelming. The best tools work with OpenTelemetry standards, making capturing and analyzing data easy without losing important context. It’s also essential to have support for logs, metrics, and traces so you can see the big picture and troubleshoot issues faster.

As your app scales, your backend should effortlessly handle the growing data load. Usability is just as important—powerful querying and intuitive dashboards can transform raw data into actionable insights. Choose a tool that’s simple to set up and supported by a strong community, ensuring you’re never stuck when you need help. Nail these essentials, and you’ll achieve seamless, smarter observability.

By considering these factors, you can choose an OpenTelemetry backend tool that aligns with your application's needs and ensures reliable, actionable observability.

1. Better Stack

Better Stack is a fantastic OpenTelemetry backend that makes managing your data effortless. With native OpenTelemetry support, it quickly turns raw logs and metrics into clear, actionable insights. Real-time monitoring pings your services every 30 seconds from various locations, and when something goes wrong, you’re not just notified—you get detailed error logs and screenshots to help you fix issues fast.

Its querying tools and easy-to-use incident management features make troubleshooting more accessible, while customizable status pages keep your users informed and happy. It’s everything you need to stay ahead of the curve, all in one intuitive platform.

🌟 Key features

• Infrastructure Monitoring
• Log and metrics management
• Incident management
• Website monitoring
• OpenTelemetry-native support

➕ Pros

• Offers drag-and-drop, SQL, and PromQL querying options
• Strong native OpenTelemetry support
• Customizable, multilingual, and feature-rich status pages
• Clean and user-friendly interface
• Slack-based workflows, AI incident silencing, and smart merging to reduce noise and accelerate response
• Iintegrations with AWS, Prometheus, Datadog, Slack, and more

➖ Cons

• Distributed tracing is currently in development but expected soon

💲 Pricing

Better Stack’s free plan provides ten monitors, 3 GB of log retention, and a status page—perfect for starting with minimal risk. The pay-as-you-go plan starts at $29/month, unlocking advanced features like unlimited alerts, extended log retention, and enhanced incident management. Tailored plans are available for enterprises, offering additional benefits such as AI-driven insights and priority support.

Learn more about pricing on the Better Stack pricing page.

2. New Relic

New Relic is a versatile OpenTelemetry backend that simplifies managing complex systems. With real-time metrics collection supporting OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and over 100 cloud services, it provides comprehensive visibility into your app's performance.

New Relic's distributed tracing is a standout feature, leveraging infinite tracing with tail-based sampling to prioritize the most critical data while cutting through the noise. When paired with its logs-in-context feature, which connects logs, traces, and metrics, it offers a simple way to identify and resolve issues quickly and efficiently.

🌟 Key features

• Infrastructure monitoring
• Infinite Tracing
• W3C Trace Context support
• Real user monitoring
• Trace propagation
• Application performance monitoring
• Log management
• Head-based sampling
• Synthetic monitoring

➕ Pros

• OpenTelemetry integration for unified data collection
• Infinite tracing with tail-based sampling for deeper insights
• Logs-in-context for efficient root-cause analysis
• Integrations with 100+ cloud services
• Advanced Query capabilities via NRQL for custom dashboards and alerts

➖ Cons

• It has a proprietary query language (NRQL) that has a steep learning curve
• High costs for data ingestion and user access

💲 Pricing

You can get started with New Relic with its free tier that offers 100 GB of monthly data ingestion and full platform access for a single user, making it a great entry point if your team is small. For teams with higher data needs, pricing starts at $0.35 per GB on a pay-as-you-go model. Pro and enterprise plans offer advanced security, extended data retention, and dedicated support tailored for larger organizations with complex requirements.

3. Logz.io

If you're looking for an open-source-friendly observability solution, Logz.io is a solid choice. It brings tools like Grafana, Prometheus, and Jaeger under one roof, simplifying application monitoring and troubleshooting. With strong OpenTelemetry integration, Logz.io makes collecting and managing telemetry data straightforward, cutting through the usual setup hassle.

Its distributed tracing gives you a clear view of microservices, helping you quickly track requests and resolve performance issues. Pair that with real-time log management for added context and detailed metrics monitoring to keep a pulse on performance trends, and you’ve got a comprehensive observability solution.

🌟 Key features

• Log management
• Distributed tracing
• Metrics monitoring
• LogMetrics
• Data optimization hub
• Infrastructure monitoring
• Service maps and dependency visualization

➕ Pros

• Data Optimization Hub significantly reduces data volume and costs (up to 32% savings)
• Unified observability experience with correlated logs, metrics, and traces
• Scalable, fully managed log ingestion and storage with built-in security and compliance (SOC-2, HIPAA)
• Customizable dashboards and a reliable alerting system with support for Slack, Opsgenie, and PagerDuty
• Trace sampling wizard simplifies OpenTelemetry configuration, reducing setup complexity
• LogMetrics converts logs into cost-efficient metrics for trend analysis
• Archive & Restore offers cost-effective long-term storage with fast data retrieval

➖ Cons

• Documentation can be inconsistent and lacking in certain areas
• Limited customization for certain aspects of dashboards and query flexibility

💲 Pricing

Logz.io uses a flexible pricing model based on data volume and service type. The 14-day free trial allows you to explore the platform’s full capabilities. Log management starts at approximately $0.90 per GB, while custom plans for metrics and tracing begin at around $29 per month. Enterprise plans offer tailored pricing with advanced features, including extended telemetry retention and premium support.

4. Dynatrace

Dynatrace is another compelling choice for an OpenTelemetry backend because it delivers a fully unified observability platform that integrates metrics, logs, and traces in one place. Its real-time Smartscape map gives you an instant, automatic view of your entire system’s dependencies, making it easier to track issues as your environment evolves.

Dynatrace is also powered by the Davis AI engine, which detects anomalies, predicts problems, and provides fast, actionable insights without manual intervention. The platform’s OpenTelemetry integration, paired with automatic instrumentation from OneAgent, ensures you can gather comprehensive data effortlessly.

🌟 Key features

• Real user monitoring
• Log management
• Digital experience monitoring
• Application security
• Infrastructure and cloud monitoring
• Distributed tracing
• Synthetic monitoring

➕ Pros

• Offers automated topology mapping and end-to-end tracing without manual setup
• OneAgent automatically captures logs, metrics, and traces without manual configuration.
• AI capabilities automate anomaly detection and provide predictive alerts
• integration with hundreds of technologies and cloud services
• Real-time vulnerability detection

➖ Cons

• The platform’s extensive features can be overwhelming

💲 Pricing

Dynatrace’s offers pay-as-you-go model is designed to adapt to your needs, offering transparent pricing without surprises. Full-stack monitoring costs $0.08 per hour for an 8 GiB host, covering everything from distributed tracing to application and infrastructure insights. Infrastructure monitoring costs just $0.04 per hour for more straightforward requirements, regardless of host size. Specialized services like Kubernetes observability, log management, and advanced security features are priced separately, ensuring you only pay for the capabilities you use.

5. Datadog

Datadog is an OpenTelemetry backend with native integration for telemetry data collection, correlation, and visualization across diverse environments.

It provides full-stack visibility, enabling end-to-end tracing, real-time metrics correlation, and efficient troubleshooting with auto-generated service overviews. Datadog’s advanced alerting system scales effortlessly, supports complex logic, and integrates with tools like Slack and PagerDuty for notifications.

Customizable dashboards and powerful data-slicing tools make analyzing metrics and identifying trends intuitive, giving you the insights needed to address performance issues quickly and effectively.

🌟 Key features

• Infrastructure monitoring
• Application performance monitoring
• Log management
• Synthetic monitoring
• Real user monitoring
• Network performance monitoring

➕ Pros

• Unified view of metrics, traces, and logs for effective troubleshooting
• Out-of-the-box monitoring capabilities and automated setup for common use cases
• Comprehensive observability with APM, infrastructure monitoring, log management, and RUM
• User-friendly interface, making it easier to set up and use without extensive training
• Extensive integrations with over 800+ tools, cloud providers, and services
• Highly customizable dashboards for detailed data visualization

➖ Cons

• High costs and unpredictable billing make it challenging to plan budgets effectively.

💲 Pricing

Datadog has flexible plans tailored to fit your needs, whether you’re just starting out or running complex DevSecOps workflows:

• Free tier: Perfect for small projects, this plan covers up to 5 hosts with 1-day metric retention to get you started quickly
• Pro tier: At $15 per host/month (billed annually), you get 15-month metric retention, access to 800+ integrations, and customizable dashboards to visualize your data like a pro
• Enterprise tier: For $23 per host/month (billed annually), unlock advanced features like machine learning-based alerts and live process monitoring for deeper insights
• DevSecOps pro: Starting at $22 per host/month, this plan adds essential security features, including scanning for misconfigurations and container vulnerability management
• DevSecOps enterprise: From $34 per host/month, get comprehensive threat detection, cloud workload security, and advanced entitlement management for the ultimate peace of mind

6. Coralogix

Coralogix is designed to simplify data handling and enhance observability without the high costs of traditional indexing. Its Streama© technology processes logs, metrics, and traces directly from cloud storage without indexing, drastically reducing storage expenses while ensuring rapid data access.

The platform excels in data enrichment, automatically parsing telemetry and adding business and operational metadata, making analysis faster and more insightful. Coralogix’s querying capabilities are flexible and user-friendly, supporting Lucene, SQL, and the speedy DataPrime language, enabling you to extract valuable insights quickly.

The Events2Metrics feature further boosts efficiency by converting log events into metrics, reducing storage needs while preserving critical observability data. With customizable dashboards and integrations like Grafana and Kubernetes, users get rich visualizations tailored to their specific needs.

🌟 Key features

• Log, metrics, and trace management
• Dynamic alerting
• Application performance monitoring
• Security monitoring
• Synthetic and real user monitoring

➕ Pros

• Streama© technology reduces costs by analyzing data in-stream without indexing
• Intuitive UI and customizable dashboards simplify data visualization
• Strong integration with OpenTelemetry, supporting multiple SDKs and various data sources like AWS, Kubernetes, and serverless environments
• Comprehensive log, metric, and trace correlation simplifies troubleshooting and improves investigation efficiency
• Excellent customer support, offering responsive, real-time assistance and dedicated onboarding

➖ Cons

• Steep learning curve for the DataPrime query language
• Limited backend storage options

💲 Pricing

Coralogix’s pricing model is designed for flexibility, charging $1.15 per GB for frequent searches, $0.50 per GB for monitoring, and just $0.17 per GB for compliance storage. The built-in TCO Optimizer offers smart cost planning, helping you control your budget. You can start with a free trial, and if you need more, they provide custom pricing options for larger data volumes.

7. Splunk

Splunkis an excellent choice for an OpenTelemetry backend due to its comprehensive approach to observability, extensive feature set, and strong support for integration.

Splunk can ingest data from virtually any source using various input methods, including forwarders and the event collector API, simplifying onboarding data. This broad compatibility makes Splunk highly versatile for OpenTelemetry use cases, providing an easy way to bring in traces, logs, and metrics.

Splunk’s proprietary Search Processing Language (SPL) is a significant differentiator, offering deep analytical capabilities with over 140 commands, supporting complex correlations like transactions, time-series analysis, and machine learning methods. Moreover, Splunk provides various visualization options and customizable dashboards, allowing you to create compelling data stories and quickly identify issues.

🌟 Key features

• Synthetic API monitoring
  
• Log management
  
• Infrastructure monitoring
  
• Incident management
  
• Application performance monitoring
  

➕ Pros

• Splunk provides powerful data visualization capabilities
• Provides real-time alerts and notifications based on custom rules -Features predictive analytics and anomaly detection to aid in proactive monitoring and insights

➖ Cons

• The platform’s architecture can be difficult to learn High costs can be a massive barrier

💲 Pricing

Splunk offers flexible pricing for various monitoring needs, from basic infrastructure to full-stack observability. Here’s a quick breakdown of their pricing:

• Infrastructure monitoring: $15 per host/month
• Full observability (APM + RUM): $75 per host/month
• Application performance monitoring (APM): $55 per host/month
• Real user monitoring (RUM): $14 per 10,000 sessions
• Synthetic API monitoring: $1 per 10,000 requests
• Incident management: $5 per user/month
• Flexible pricing options: workload-based, data ingestion, or entity count

8. Honeycomb

Honeycomb unifies logs, metrics, and traces into a single format, offering a simple approach to observability. Its OpenTelemetry support and SDKs for popular languages simplify data integration and ensure compatibility.

With a powerful query engine designed for high-cardinality data, Honeycomb delivers near-instant results, enabling faster incident resolution. Features like BubbleUp automatically surface anomalies, making pinpointing outliers and resolving issues easier. The service map adds clarity by visualizing system dependencies, helping you understand architecture at a glance and dive deeper into specific components.

🌟 Key features

• Log management
• Service maps
• Distributed tracing
• Service level objective

➕ Pros

• Features like query annotations, team history, and persistent queries simplify collaboration
• Provides intelligent sampling to manage event volume and make debugging data more resource-efficient
• The BubbleUp feature automatically detects anomalies and highlights outliers in visualizations
• The intuitive UI and helpful guides make it easy to get started

➖ Cons

• Honeycomb does not perform aggregation or roll-ups for time series data, which may be a limitation if you need business-level metric reporting
• Does not support observability features like real user monitoring or live log tailing.

💲 Pricing

Honeycomb offers a free plan with up to 20 million monthly events, perfect for getting started and exploring its powerful features. If you need more, the pro plan begins at just $130 per month, covering up to 100 million events, with flexible scalability that can support up to 1.5 billion events. For more extensive or unique needs, custom pricing options are also available to fit your requirements.

9. Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic is a tool that intergrates OpenTelemetry as a core part of its observability strategy, emphasizing its role as a comprehensive, cloud-native framework for collecting telemetry data. Sumo logic also combines multiple aspects of monitoring, such as infrastructure security, cloud SIEM, log analytics, and application observability, into a single platform. The platform excels in handling large-scale data, boasting an average of 35TB daily log ingestion and analyzing up to 500,000 data points per minute.

Along with this, Sumo Logic provides out-of-the-box (OOTB) dashboards and analytics, allowing you to quickly pinpoint issues, identify recurring errors, and resolve underlying problems effectively. It has a query feature, which allows you to search through large datasets and correlate information quickly. The platform also integrates with a variety of cloud services and technologies, including AWS CloudTrail, Kubernetes, Linux, and Apache.

🌟 Key features

• Log management and analytics
• Infrastructure monitoring
• Application observability
• Integrated cloud SIEM

➕ Pros

• Sumo Logic covers logs, metrics, and traces with integrated support for OpenTelemetry
• Provides extensive monitoring for AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes
• Includes advanced features like anomaly detection, predictive metrics, and automated log-level detection
• Features entity normalization, risk assessment, and automated remediation
• Allows creation of custom dashboards, automated alerts, and tailored visualizations

➖ Cons

Initial configuration can be complex for new users Logs can sometimes be difficult to interpret due to their format

💲 Pricing

Sumo Logic makes it easy to get started with a free plan that offers basic log, metric, and trace capacity, along with a 7-day retention period—perfect if you want to try it out. For growing businesses, the essentials plan steps things up with unlimited log ingestion, enhanced metrics, and standard support, giving you the tools you need to scale confidently. If you need top-tier features, the enterprise suite delivers unlimited capacity, custom data retention, and round-the-clock 24/7 support, making it the go-to choice for large organizations focused on security and compliance.

10. Elastic Cloud

Finish off our list Elastic Cloud offers a powerful OpenTelemetry backend built on Elasticsearch, combining real-time analysis, advanced search, and robust security. With OpenTelemetry SDKs for easy telemetry data ingestion and support for custom configurations, Elastic ensures flexibility without vendor lock-in.

Elastic’s real-time analysis and interactive visualizations allow the monitoring of traces, logs, and metrics from one platform. Security features like document- and field-level controls protect sensitive data, while cross-cluster search and autoscaling enable effortless scaling across regions.

Elastic delivers features like auto-scaling, cross-cluster replication, and real-time monitoring for enterprise needs, making it a great choice for managing complex, large-scale observability infrastructures.

🌟 Key features

• Log management
• Metrics monitoring
• Distributed tracing
• Cross-cluster search
• Service maps
• Event management

➕ Pros

• Unified platform for search, observability, and security
• Deployable across multiple cloud providers, including AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure
• Advanced security features, such as document- and field-level access controls, ensure compliance and data protection
• Supports innovative features like large language models and generative AI

➖ Cons

• Pricing can be higher compared to self-managed Elasticsearch deployments
• Resource-intensive, requiring significant compute and storage capacity

💲 Pricing

Elastic Cloud offers several pricing plans to suit different needs. At $95 per month, the standard plan includes core Elastic Stack tools and basic security. The gold plan, priced at $109, adds advanced alerting and reporting. The platinum plan, at $125, includes advanced security and machine learning features. For larger organizations, the enterprise plan at $175 per month offers everything in the platinum plan plus additional enterprise-grade features. Each plan scales to support your growing needs.

11. SigNoz

SigNoz is an OpenTelemetry-native observability platform that unifies logs, metrics, and traces in a single interface. Positioned as an alternative to Datadog and New Relic, SigNoz simplifies debugging by correlating signals for richer context while maintaining flexibility with deployment options.

Built on ClickHouse, SigNoz ensures fast and efficient storage for observability data. Its powerful querying capabilities, including DIY query builders and PromQL, make it easy to extract actionable insights. With OpenTelemetry-native support, SigNoz eliminates vendor lock-in, offering integration with modern telemetry standards.

🌟 Key features

• Application performance monitoring & distributed tracing
• log management
• Exception tracking
• Infrastructure monitoring

➕ Pros

• Combines logs, metrics, and traces in one platform, reducing tool sprawl
• Self-hosted and cloud deployment options ensure flexibility
• Supports correlated signals for efficient root cause analysis
• Transparent pricing with no user or host-based fees

➖ Cons

• Requires setup and maintenance for self-hosted deployments

💲 Pricing

SigNoz offers free self-hosting, with managed options available. Its usage-based pricing ensures scalability without hidden costs. Metrics are priced at $0.10 per million samples, providing an affordable alternative to user-based pricing models.

12. Jaeger

Jaeger is an open-source distributed tracing platform that monitors and troubleshoots workflows in complex distributed systems. Jaeger originated at Uber as a tool to track service requests, identify bottlenecks, and analyze service dependencies and was later donated to the CNCF.

Jaeger integrates with OpenTelemetry, allowing you to collect and process trace data using OTLP. Its topology graphs and service performance monitoring (SPM) provide a detailed view of system dependencies and trends, allowing rapid troubleshooting. With support for storage backends like Cassandra, Elasticsearch, and ClickHouse, Jaeger is highly scalable, processing billions of spans daily in production environments.

🌟 Key features

• Distributed tracing
• Topology graphs (system architecture and dependency graphs)
• Service performance monitoring (SPM)
• Adaptive sampling
• OpenTelemetry-native support

➕ Pros

• Designed for high scalability, with no single points of failure
• OpenTelemetry and Zipkin compatibility ensure easy integration
• Supports advanced storage options like ClickHouse for cost-effective data retention
• Modern React-based web UI for intuitive trace exploration

➖ Cons

• Limited support for logs and metrics—focused primarily on tracing
• Requires setup and configuration expertise for optimal deployment

💲 Pricing

Jaeger is entirely free and open-source, making it an excellent choice for a cost-effective distributed tracing solution. Its flexibility to self-host on a range of storage backends allows for fine-tuned control over operational costs.

13. Prometheus

Prometheus is a leading open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit that excels in collecting and storing metrics. Prometheus identifies time series data by metric names and key-value pairs and is built with a highly dimensional data model, enabling powerful querying with PromQL.

Prometheus works well in cloud-native and microservices environments, leveraging a pull model for metrics collection and supporting federation for scalability. Its autonomous architecture ensures reliability during outages, while integrations with Grafana provide advanced visualization options.

🌟 Key features

• Dimensional data model with PromQL for querying
• Time series collection via HTTP pull model
• Alertmanager for precise alerting and notifications
• Built-in and Grafana-based visualization
• Extensive exporter ecosystem for integrating third-party data sources

➕ Pros

• Highly scalable with support for federation and functional sharding
• Autonomous servers eliminate external dependencies for reliability
• Wide range of exporters for diverse integrations
• Strong OpenTelemetry support for metric ingestion

➖ Cons

• Focused solely on metrics, requiring additional tools for logs and traces
• Lack of built-in long-term storage—requires third-party integrations like Thanos or Cortex

💲 Pricing

Prometheus is entirely free and open-source, ideal for teams prioritizing cost-effective observability. Self-hosted deployments allow full control over scalability and infrastructure costs.

Final thoughts

Selecting the proper OpenTelemetry backend is essential for storing and analyzing your logs, metrics, and traces. This article reviewed several backend tools, highlighting their features, pros and cons, and pricing options. With this information, you should better understand which tool best fits your needs. Consider exploring free plans or trial versions to test the most promising solutions and determine which aligns best with your observability requirements.

Article by

Stanley Ulili

Stanley Ulili is a technical educator at Better Stack based in Malawi. He specializes in backend development and has freelanced for platforms like DigitalOcean, LogRocket, and AppSignal. Stanley is passionate about making complex topics accessible to developers.

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