OpenTelemetry is a vendor-neutral observability framework used to collect traces, metrics, and logs from applications, services, and infrastructure. It gives teams a shared way to instrument software so requests can be followed across microservices, APIs, and background jobs, even when different languages, clouds, or monitoring tools are involved. In practice, it helps answer not just is it up? but what happened to this request?
In cyber security, OpenTelemetry matters because attackers often hide inside normal-looking distributed traffic. Centralized traces and logs can reveal suspicious API chains, unusual authentication paths, unexpected tool calls, or sudden changes in latency and error rates. Defenders use it to correlate events across systems, detect abuse, support incident response, and verify that controls are working. In AI and other complex production systems, it also helps expose behavior changes that uptime checks would miss.