OpenTelemetry Alternatives - For When You're Done Debugging Your Debugging Tools

The comparison table above gives you the numbers, but numbers don't tell the whole story. Let me walk you through what it's actually like to migrate off OpenTelemetry - the good, bad, and ugly parts that never make it into the sales demos.

Look, I really wanted OpenTelemetry to work. Vendor neutral observability sounds amazing on paper, and I hate being locked into expensive tools as much as anyone. But after two years of fighting with collectors and YAML files that make no fucking sense, I'm done.

What Actually Made Me Switch

Last month our collector crashed three times during business hours. Not because of application load - because of some memory leak that happens when you configure tail sampling wrong. Issue #9590, took them 6 months to acknowledge it was even a real problem. Anyway, I burned 6 hours on a Saturday reading GitHub issues trying to figure out why our "simple" setup was eating 8GB of RAM and dumping core files everywhere.

Then our new junior dev asked me to explain our monitoring setup. I realized I was giving him a 45-minute lecture about processors, exporters, and receivers just so he could add one fucking metric to his service. That's when I knew we'd completely lost the plot.

Our collector config file ended up being like 237 lines just for basic functionality. Half of it was shit I copy-pasted from Stack Overflow and barely understood. Then collector v0.91.0 came out and broke our trace sampling. Spent two days figuring out that the probabilistic_sampler processor changed its default behavior with zero fucking mention in the release notes. Error logs just showed "failed to process batch" - super helpful.

More recent updates keep breaking our memory management in ways that make no sense - queries that used to take 200ms suddenly take 30+ seconds for no reason I can figure out. I think it's related to memory limiter changes but honestly I'm just guessing at this point because the error messages are useless.

How I've Actually Migrated Teams Off OpenTelemetry

First thing I tried: Just swap the backend

Keep all your OpenTelemetry instrumentation, but send the data somewhere else instead of your collector setup. SigNoz and Uptrace can just eat OTLP data directly, so you don't have to change any application code.

This worked great for one team because their problem was specifically the collector crashing, not the SDKs. Took about a week to set up SigNoz and point all their services at it instead of their local collector.

What usually works: Switch one service at a time

Pick your most annoying service - the one where you're always debugging why traces are missing or whatever. Replace the OpenTelemetry stuff with Datadog's agent or New Relic's agent or whatever you're trying.

Run both in parallel for a few weeks to make sure you're not losing important data. This is boring but it works. Most agents just auto-instrument everything without you having to configure processors and exporters and all that crap.

The nuclear option: Burn it all down

Sometimes OpenTelemetry is so fucked that you just need to start over. I had one team where the collector was using 12GB of RAM and nobody understood why. We ripped out everything and installed Dynatrace OneAgent.

Yeah, it's dramatic, but when your monitoring is actively hurting your production environment, just fix it. Life's too short to debug YAML files on weekends.

The Real Cost of "Free" OpenTelemetry

Everyone focuses on the monthly cost of alternatives, but OpenTelemetry isn't actually free. You're paying in engineer time and weekend debugging sessions.

I tracked our time for a month - we were burning 9.5 hours per week just keeping OpenTelemetry running, probably more if you count the weekend debugging sessions and the random "why is this trace missing?" bullshit. That's one engineer spending almost 2.5 days per month on infrastructure instead of features. That's like 20% of one engineer's time. Even if SigNoz or Datadog costs $1,500/month, that's way cheaper than paying me to babysit collectors every fucking weekend.

SigNoz still needs some maintenance - you have to update it, scale it when you grow, deal with the occasional Docker issue. But it's like 2 hours a month instead of 8 hours a week.

With Datadog, we basically never think about the observability infrastructure. Install the agent, it just works. Costs more but honestly, sleeping through weekends is worth it.

How Long This Actually Takes

Sales demos make it look like you can migrate in an afternoon. Yeah, right.

Week 1: Test it on your laptop. Everything looks great, you're convinced this will be easy.

Week 2-3: First production service. Surprise! Your setup has some weird edge case that doesn't work with the new tool. Spent a week figuring out why half our traces were missing - turns out our internal service mesh was rewriting headers and breaking the trace context. Error message: "trace not found." Real helpful.

Weeks 4-7: Each service you migrate has its own special problems. The one with custom spans breaks differently than the one with high cardinality metrics. You start questioning all your life choices and wondering why you didn't just become a product manager.

Weeks 8-12: Rebuilding dashboards. This is the absolute worst part. Every alert, every graph, every custom query has to be recreated from scratch. You can't just import this shit, and you realize you don't remember what half of your old dashboards were even for.

Weeks 12-16: Getting everyone trained on the new UI and query language. People keep going back to the old system because they actually know how to use it, and you're stuck being the "monitoring guy" who has to fix everyone's broken queries.

Just plan for 4-5 months even if you think it'll be quick. I've literally never seen a monitoring migration finish on time. Not once.

What Actually Breaks During Migration

Your historical data is basically gone - I've never successfully imported all our OpenTelemetry traces into another system. You can export some stuff, but realistically you're losing detailed history. Plan for this.

Every dashboard and alert - This is the part that sucks the most. That custom dashboard you spent hours perfecting? You get to rebuild it from scratch. PromQL queries don't magically become Datadog queries.

Your internal tooling - If you built any scripts or tools that read OpenTelemetry data directly, those are broken now. We had like 5 different internal scripts that assumed Jaeger trace format.

Everyone's muscle memory - Your team knows where to click in Grafana and how to write PromQL queries. New system means everyone's back to googling "how do I filter traces by status code" again.

What Actually Works Instead

Based on migrations I've done or watched other teams do:

If you just want it to work: Datadog - Yeah it's expensive, but the agent installs in one line and just works. Auto-discovers everything, dashboards are decent out of the box. We went from spending 8 hours/week on monitoring to maybe 30 minutes. Worth every penny.

If you're on a budget: SigNoz - Open source, can eat your existing OpenTelemetry data, way less complex than the collector setup. You'll still need to maintain it yourself but it's manageable. Their cloud offering is pretty cheap too.

If you're enterprise and have money: Dynatrace - The AI stuff actually works and automatically figures out what's wrong with your app. Expensive as hell but if you're a big company, the automation is legit.

If you're already using Prometheus: Grafana Cloud - Managed Prometheus + Tempo + Loki. Familiar interface, reasonable pricing, handles the operational stuff for you.

About Vendor Lock-In

Yeah, you're gonna get locked in somehow. OpenTelemetry promises vendor neutrality, but you're still locked into their complexity, their configuration format, their way of doing things.

With alternatives, you get locked into their pricing and data formats instead. But honestly, I'd rather be locked into Datadog's pricing than locked into spending my evenings debugging YAML files.

The question isn't "how do I avoid lock-in?" It's "what kind of lock-in can I actually live with?"

Just Pick Something That Works

This isn't really a technical decision - it's about what kind of pain you want to deal with.

Keep OpenTelemetry if you have someone who actually enjoys configuring collectors and doesn't mind getting paged when they break. Some teams have dedicated platform engineers who live for this stuff.

Switch to something else if you just want to ship features without thinking about your observability stack. Pay Datadog or New Relic or whoever and get on with your life.

Both choices are fine. The wrong choice is pretending that "free" observability doesn't cost you in operational overhead and weekend debugging sessions. Just pick something and stick with it - the perfect solution doesn't exist.

OK, so OpenTelemetry is driving you fucking crazy and you want to switch to something else. But which option? There's a ton of marketing bullshit out there, so let me cut through it and tell you what I've actually seen work in production.

I've migrated teams off OpenTelemetry to a bunch of different tools. Here's what actually worked and what didn't, based on real migrations with real problems:

SigNoz: If You Like OpenTelemetry But Hate Collectors

SigNoz basically takes your existing OpenTelemetry instrumentation and just... works with it. No weird config files, no collector crashes, it just ingests OTLP data directly.

I used this for a team that liked their OpenTelemetry SDKs but was tired of their collector eating memory and crashing. Took about a week to migrate - pointed all their services at SigNoz instead of their collector setup.

The queries are way faster than Jaeger was - they use ClickHouse for storage which is genuinely better for traces. And they don't charge you extra for custom metrics like Datadog does, which is nice when you have a lot of OpenTelemetry instrumentation.

SigNoz recently improved their log handling, so you can get traces, metrics, AND logs in one place without needing a separate log aggregation system. The query performance got way better too - complex trace queries that used to take forever now actually finish in reasonable time, though I haven't benchmarked it precisely.

I'd recommend their cloud version unless you really want to self-host. The self-hosted version needs Docker knowledge and you have to manage the database yourself. The cloud version just works.

Good for: Teams that like OpenTelemetry but are done with collector operational headaches.

Datadog: Just Pay Money and Sleep Well

This is the "throw money at the problem" solution, and honestly? Sometimes that's exactly what you need.

I migrated one team to Datadog after their OpenTelemetry collector crashed during Black Friday at 11:47 PM and took down their ability to debug the actual application problems. We were getting "connection pool exhausted" errors and had no fucking clue where they were coming from because our traces were gone. Installing the Datadog agent took like 20 minutes per server, it auto-discovered everything, and we never had monitoring infrastructure problems again.

The agent uses maybe 200MB of RAM and just works. We went from spending 8+ hours a week keeping our observability stack running to basically never thinking about it.

The downside is cost. Datadog is expensive as fuck, and it gets more expensive as you grow. Custom metrics cost like 5 cents each per month, which adds up fast if you're using a lot of OpenTelemetry instrumentation. One team I worked with saw their bill go from $1500 to like $12,000 a month as they scaled.

Their pricing keeps changing constantly, but you're still paying per host which gets stupid expensive. Check their calculator because the costs vary wildly depending on what features you actually use.

But here's the thing - if your time is worth more than the subscription cost, it's worth it. I sleep better knowing our monitoring won't be the thing that breaks during an incident.

Good for: Teams that can afford it and value their time more than money.

Grafana Cloud: If You Already Know Prometheus

If your team is already using Prometheus and Grafana, this is the obvious choice. It's basically managed versions of the tools you already know, plus they can ingest OpenTelemetry data.

I worked with a team that was spending like 10 hours a week keeping their self-hosted Grafana/Prometheus stack running. Migrated to Grafana Cloud and that dropped to maybe 1-2 hours a month.

The nice thing is you keep all your existing dashboards and PromQL queries. No need to learn a completely new system. And if you want to self-host again later, you can export everything.

The downside is if you're not already familiar with Prometheus, PromQL is a pain in the ass to learn. It's powerful but the syntax is fucking weird.

Good for: Teams already using Prometheus who want managed infrastructure.

New Relic: Different Pricing Model

New Relic charges by data volume instead of number of hosts, which can be way cheaper if you don't generate massive amounts of telemetry.

I migrated one team that was generating a shitload of data - 8.3TB/month according to our usage dashboard. With Datadog's host-based pricing, they were looking at $11,847/month once we hit production scale. New Relic was way cheaper - $2,347 on their data-based pricing, that invoice is burned into my brain because my manager made me present it to the entire engineering team.

Their query language (NRQL) is basically SQL, which is nice if your team already knows SQL. Way easier than learning PromQL or Datadog's query syntax.

The free tier is pretty generous - 100GB/month is enough to test it properly with real workloads. They keep updating what's included but it's enough to evaluate whether their platform works for you.

New Relic's auto-instrumentation seems decent for the common stuff like Java, .NET, and Node.js. I haven't tested it as extensively as Datadog's setup but from what I've seen it covers most basic use cases without writing tons of custom instrumentation.

Good for: Teams that generate reasonable amounts of telemetry and want predictable data-based pricing.

Dynatrace: For When Money Isn't the Problem

Dynatrace is expensive as fuck but the AI stuff actually works. Their OneAgent installs and automatically figures out your entire infrastructure without any configuration bullshit.

I worked with one team that couldn't figure out why their microservices were randomly slow. Dynatrace mapped all their dependencies automatically and their AI (Davis) pointed to connection pool issues that were causing cascading failures. Would have taken us weeks to figure that out manually.

The weird thing is learning to trust the AI recommendations. It'll tell you "this database is the root cause" and it's usually right, but it takes time to get comfortable with that.

Pricing is enterprise-scale - I've heard numbers like $40,000+ per year minimum but honestly I don't deal with enterprise pricing directly. But if you're a big company where downtime costs more than that, it's probably worth it.

Good for: Big companies with complex infrastructure who can afford premium tooling.

Just Pick One Already

SigNoz if you like your OpenTelemetry setup but hate managing collectors.

Datadog if you can afford it and want to stop thinking about monitoring infrastructure.

Grafana Cloud if you're already using Prometheus and just want someone else to manage it.

New Relic if you generate reasonable data volumes and want to pay by usage instead of host count.

Dynatrace if you're a big company and can afford premium tooling.

Stop overthinking it - literally any of these options is probably better than fighting with OpenTelemetry collectors every goddamn weekend.

If you want more detailed comparisons of features, pricing, and integration stuff, the next section has tables breaking down what I know about how these tools actually compare.

The Bottom Line

Every alternative involves trade-offs. OpenTelemetry maximizes flexibility at the cost of complexity. These alternatives reduce complexity by accepting specific constraints—whether that's vendor lock-in, pricing models, or feature limitations.

The right choice depends on your team's specific pain points with OpenTelemetry. Are you drowning in configuration complexity? Choose SigNoz or Datadog. Struggling with costs? New Relic or Grafana Cloud might be better fits. Need AI-powered insights? Dynatrace is worth the premium.

Don't make the decision based purely on features or pricing—consider the total organizational impact of switching your observability approach.