Free the data: Why US federal agencies should standardize on OpenTelemetry

Vendor lock-in and proprietary solutions have long plagued the government's technology landscape, resulting in exorbitant costs and wasted taxpayer dollars. By standardizing on OpenTelemetry, agencies can avoid vendor lock-in and promote healthy competition among vendors, leading to significant cost savings. According to a recent report by Garland Consulting, reducing vendor lock-in by just 5% could produce a staggering $750 million in taxpayer savings every year. As the national debt approaches $35 trillion, every dollar saved through cost-effective solutions like OpenTelemetry will contribute to fiscal responsibility and accountability.

OpenTelemetry allows the applications and infrastructure arm of government projects to be monitored, optimized, and improved by the widest set of industry tools. This reduces reliance on native platform tools and helps prevent lock-in to any particular vendor. Improved interoperability enhances operational efficiency as well as collaboration among teams and even agencies. In an era where cross-agency cooperation is crucial for addressing complex challenges, OpenTelemetry provides a common language and schema for data exchange, allowing the government to create centers of excellence in fields like IT management and security by solving the data-ingestion challenge.

As an open standard maintained by a growing and vibrant community, OpenTelemetry is more likely to evolve and adapt to new technologies and requirements compared to proprietary formats. This adaptability ensures long-term viability and reduces the need for frequent migrations — ultimately saving taxpayer money. In addition, OpenTelemetry's flexibility allows agencies to tailor observability to their specific needs, enabling them to adapt to changing requirements and adopt innovative solutions as they emerge.

Open standards like OpenTelemetry can be thoroughly reviewed and audited for security and compliance, providing transparency and accountability in the handling of government data. With cybersecurity threats continuing to rise, OpenTelemetry's open-source architecture allows for continuous security improvements and vulnerability identification by the global community, which strengthens the government's cybersecurity posture.

OpenTelemetry is designed to handle telemetry data at scale, making it suitable for large-scale government systems and applications. This scalability enables agencies to adopt innovative technologies without compromising performance, ensuring that critical services remain responsive and reliable.

By embracing OpenTelemetry, the US government can position itself as a leader in technological innovation. OpenTelemetry's community-driven development fosters the rapid integration of new technologies and best practices, allowing agencies to stay at the forefront of technological advancements. This not only enhances the government's operational capabilities but also sets an example for other organizations to follow.

System reliability, operational efficiency, and creating great experiences for citizens depend on improving the way we monitor and analyze data in real time, particularly in multi-cloud or multi-agency environments. Adopting OpenTelemetry standards can significantly enhance the government's ability to manage and analyze telemetry data across diverse systems. OpenTelemetry provides a unified, vendor-neutral framework for collecting, processing, and exporting metrics, logs, and traces, which simplifies the integration and analysis of data from various sources. This standardization reduces the complexity and cost associated with managing disparate monitoring tools and enhances the ability to gain comprehensive insights into system performance and security. By leveraging OpenTelemetry, the government can ensure more consistent and reliable data collection, leading to better decision-making and improved service delivery for citizens and internal users alike.

The adoption of OpenTelemetry as a standardized observability framework across federal agencies can unlock significant benefits for taxpayers, promote interoperability and collaboration, future-proof government systems, enhance security and compliance, and foster innovation. It is time to free the data and embrace the power of open standards for a more efficient, secure, and technologically advanced government.

Elastic is committed to helping OpenTelemetry become the best de facto data collection infrastructure for observability. In addition to contributing the Elastic Common Schema  (ECS) and our Universal Profiling agent to OpenTelemetry, Elastic is also standardizing on OpenTelemetry for our main data collection architecture for observability and security. Ultimately, Elastic’s continued support of OpenTelemetry helps government agencies save costs and reduces tool sprawl by standardizing technology and data with a consistent set of integrations, libraries, and schemas — giving teams more bandwidth to focus on mission outcomes.

Learn more about how Elastic Observability can help government agencies gain holistic visibility and improve IT operations:

• Blog: Why public sector needs AI-powered observability

• Ebook: Elastic in action: Operational resilience in public sector

• Ebook: Why observability is a critical component of public sector digital strategy