# What is Telemetry?

> Telemetry is data emitted by software systems about their own behavior - logs, metrics, traces, and events - collected remotely to monitor, debug, and optimize those systems.

Source: https://openobserve.ai/glossary/what-is-telemetry/
Published: 2026-07-08
Term: Telemetry
Category: Observability Fundamentals
Related terms: what-is-observability, three-pillars-of-observability, what-is-telemetry-pipeline, what-is-otlp

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**Telemetry** is the data a software system emits about its own behavior, collected and transmitted to a remote system for analysis. The word literally means "measuring at a distance" (from the Greek *tele* + *metron*), and it entered software from aerospace: engineers on the ground understanding a spacecraft they can't inspect directly - exactly the situation of an engineer debugging a production system they can't attach a debugger to.

## Types of telemetry data

In modern systems, telemetry usually means the [three pillars of observability](/glossary/three-pillars-of-observability/):

- **Logs** - timestamped records of discrete events
- **Metrics** - numeric measurements over time
- **Traces** - records of a request's path through distributed services

Broader definitions also include events, continuous profiling data, real-user-monitoring signals from browsers and mobile apps, and - increasingly - token counts, latencies, and prompt/response records from LLM calls.

## How telemetry is collected

Telemetry originates from **instrumentation**: code (manual or automatic) that records what the application is doing. It is then gathered by agents or collectors, optionally processed in a [telemetry pipeline](/glossary/what-is-telemetry-pipeline/) (filtering, redaction, enrichment, sampling), and shipped to a backend for storage and analysis.

The industry standard for all of this is **OpenTelemetry (OTel)**, a CNCF project that provides vendor-neutral SDKs, an agent (the [OpenTelemetry Collector](/glossary/what-is-opentelemetry-collector/)), and a wire protocol ([OTLP](/glossary/what-is-otlp/)). Instrumenting once with OTel means you can switch backends without re-instrumenting.

## Why telemetry strategy matters

Telemetry volume grows faster than traffic: more services, more granular instrumentation, more retained history. Uncontrolled, it becomes a major line item - per-GB ingest pricing is the main driver of surprise observability bills. Good telemetry strategy balances coverage (enough signal to debug anything) against cost (sampling, filtering, tiered retention).

## Telemetry in OpenObserve

OpenObserve is an OpenTelemetry-native backend: it accepts OTLP logs, metrics, and traces directly, and its [pipelines](/pipelines/) let you filter, transform, and redact telemetry at ingest. Columnar storage on S3-compatible object stores keeps long retention affordable even at high telemetry volumes.