OpenTelemetry, usually shortened to OTel, is a CNCF project that defines how applications and infrastructure produce telemetry and how that telemetry reaches a backend. It spans three signals (traces, metrics, and logs) and provides SDKs, a standalone collector, and OTLP, the protocol used to ship data over HTTP or gRPC.
The part that matters operationally is the semantic conventions: an agreed set of metric and attribute names, so that system.cpu.time or system.memory.usage means the same thing no matter who collects it or where it is stored. That decoupling is the real payoff. Instrumentation lives in your code and on your hosts, the backend becomes a routing decision, and switching vendors turns into a configuration change instead of a re-instrumentation project. The collector sits in the middle and can batch, filter, and fan the same stream out to more than one destination.
For infrastructure specifically, the hostmetrics receiver defines the canonical CPU, memory, filesystem, disk, and network metrics. Hyperping's server agent embeds an OpenTelemetry collector and exports OTLP over HTTP with gzipped payloads, using metric names that match those hostmetrics conventions, so the same signals stay portable if you ever want to send them somewhere else as well.
