OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry is a way of organizing the usage records that many programs leave behind — who used what, how many times, how long it took, what failed — into one shared format. It's a bit like how phone chargers used to have different connectors for every manufacturer until everyone settled on a single common standard. Even if the company that built a program is different from the company that built the dashboard used to monitor it, following this standard lets the two connect without friction.

For example, if a company uses some AI tool, that tool can record its usage data in the OpenTelemetry format, and the company can pull that data straight into whatever monitoring dashboard it already uses to see who's using how much and where costs are leaking. This means the company that made the tool doesn't need to build its own monitoring dashboard from scratch.

That said, these records are only reference numbers — they don't necessarily match the actual bill exactly. Things like discounts or price changes need to be checked against separate billing data.

Articles describe this as things like "integrating OpenTelemetry metrics from a coding agent into CloudWatch" or "providing an OpenTelemetry-compatible log drain." It's important not to confuse OpenTelemetry with a product made by a single company — it's an open data-format standard that many companies follow together. Companies like AWS or Hedra "support" this standard; they didn't invent or own it.