OpenTelemetry and the Reality of Vendor Choice with Adriana Villela and Josh Lee

I still hear people say, “OpenTelemetry is vendor-neutral, so you can switch any time!”
In this episode, Adriana Villela and Josh Lee (both active OpenTelemetry contributors) help bust that myth.
While OTel standardizes instrumentation and signal transport—and unlocks a rich ecosystem of tools—switching vendors isn’t as simple as it sounds. There’s real cost in retraining engineers, migrating dashboards, SLOs, and alerts, and reworking deep integrations across your delivery pipeline.
We also dive into a key challenge the community is tackling: helping engineers instrument by value, not by default—making it easier to capture the right signals with high quality instead of just collecting everything.

Here the links we discussed:
Adriana's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrianavillela/
Josh's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuamlee/
The blog article: https://thenewstack.io/opentelemetry-vendor-neutrality-guide/
CND Austria Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gxLseuaTdM
KCD Prague Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPXG20CXKxQ
OpenTelemetry Project Website: https://opentelemetry.io/