OTLP
The standard OpenTelemetry protocol for transmitting telemetry between systems.
Definition
The OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) is a specification that describes the encoding, transport, and delivery mechanism of telemetry data between telemetry sources, intermediate collectors, and observability backends. OTLP is a general-purpose delivery protocol designed within the OpenTelemetry project.
In depth
OTLP supports all three core telemetry signals — traces, metrics, and logs — in a single, unified protocol. It uses Protocol Buffers (protobuf) for efficient binary encoding and supports both gRPC and HTTP transport. OTLP has rapidly become the de facto standard for telemetry export: major cloud providers, APM vendors, and open-source tools all support it natively. Adopting OTLP means your instrumentation is vendor-neutral: you can switch observability backends without re-instrumenting your code. obseria.io accepts OTLP over both gRPC (port 4317) and HTTP (port 4318).
Related terms
See OTLP in action
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