Notes on Vendor Neutral Observability Instrumentation

I’d like to discuss the benefits and limitations of Vendor Neutral Observability Instrumentation. I believe that discussion around “Vendor Neutral”, or “Vendor Agnostic”, in the context of Observability has become a sales fueled oversimplification, framed as a silver bullet that solves Vendor Lock-In, rather than a nuanced topic with real tradeoffs. Whether the tradeoffs are worthwhile depends largely on the end user themselves, their needs, and their expectations. This oversimplification is typical of Observability sales. A term like Vendor Neutral starts as technical jargon, in this case something used to describe Open Source projects like OpenTelemetry, or Vector, or Prometheus, even Fluentbit or Fluentd. It gains some mindshare, getting bubbled up through Feature Requests and meetings. Then, because it's the holy trinity of technical, popular, and new (“a glittering lure”, as Don Draper says), inevitably it gets seized upon by the relentless vampire squid that is sales and marketin

I’d like to discuss the benefits and limitations of Vendor Neutral Observability Instrumentation. I believe that discussion around “Vendor Neutral”, or “Vendor Agnostic”, in the context of Observability has become a sales fueled oversimplification, framed as a silver bullet that solves Vendor Lock-In, rather than a nuanced topic with real tradeoffs. Whether the tradeoffs are worthwhile depends largely on the end user themselves, their needs, and their expectations. This oversimplification is typical of Observability sales. A term like Vendor Neutral starts as technical jargon, in this case som