OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP)

OTLP is a communication standard that lets a program package up the numbers recording what it did — and send them in a common wrapper that any tool can read.

Think of it like a standardized shipping box. If the box size and label format are fixed, any warehouse can sort the box just by reading the label, without opening it. OTLP works the same way: no matter which program produced the data, records like request counts, processing times, or usage amounts get packed into the same format, so a dashboard on the receiving end can turn them straight into charts or tables without any extra translation.

That's why a developer's tool and the dashboard that displays its data can exchange information even if they come from different companies — as long as they both follow this packaging standard.

The article explains that when you run a coding agent, the usage metrics it produces get packaged in OTLP format and sent to an address that Amazon's CloudWatch understands (an OTLP endpoint). It's worth noting here that OTLP isn't a product of any single company — it's just a common transmission format that many tools share.