A single map of the open-source observability stack, and the honest catch on every piece.
The open-source observability world looks crowded until you see the shape of it. Almost everything sorts into four jobs: collect the telemetry, ship it, store it by signal, and look at it. Here is the whole stack in one place, with a link to the plain-English, honest read on each tool.
Every tool is mapped to the signal it owns and how they connect.
The pieces, and the catch on each
Collect and ship. OpenTelemetry is the vendor-neutral standard that produces the data, though it is a framework, not a backend. Grafana Alloy is a distribution of the Collector. eBPF is the kernel technology behind zero-code collection, and Odigos puts it to work with no code changes.
Metrics: Prometheus, the default, now OTLP-native. The catch: cardinality and the memory wall.
Logs: Loki, cheap by design. The catch: weak at open-ended full-text search.
Traces: Jaeger, the open, standard trace backend, and the concept behind it, distributed tracing. The catch: the storage behind it is the real work.
See it: Grafana, one pane over all three. The catch: a green dashboard is not a healthy system.
Go deep: the OpenTelemetry Collector implementation guide for the full how-to.
How it connects
OpenTelemetry is the shared wire format, the language the pieces agreed to speak. A collector like Grafana Alloy gathers everything and routes each signal to its home. Prometheus 3.0 and Jaeger v2 now speak OTLP natively, so the seams keep shrinking. Pick the pieces you need, and hold on to one thing: the tools are the easy part. The honest work is in cardinality, sampling, storage cost, and whether anyone acts on what the dashboard shows.
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