Overview

The OpenTelemetry C++ API enables developers to instrument their applications and libraries in order to make them ready to create and emit telemetry data. The OpenTelemetry C++ API exclusively focuses on instrumentation and does not address concerns like exporting, sampling, and aggregating telemetry data. Those concerns are addressed by the OpenTelemetry C++ SDK. This architecture enables developers to instrument applications and libraries with the OpenTelemetry C++ API while being completely agnostic of how telemetry data is exported and processed.

Library design

The OpenTelemetry C++ API is provided as a header-only library and supports all recent versions of the C++ standard, down to C++14.

A single application might dynamically or statically link to different libraries that were compiled with different compilers, while several of the linked libraries are instrumented with OpenTelemetry. OpenTelemetry C++ supports those scenarios by providing a stable ABI. This is achieved by a careful API design, and most notably by providing ABI stable versions of classes from the standard library. All those classes are provided in the opentelemetry::nostd namespace.