Why Embrace bet on OpenTelemetry, and what that means for our customers

Let’s be honest: Much of the observability ecosystem has been built on the premise of lock-in. Closed ecosystems. Opaque pricing. Proprietary agents. The result? Customers get stuck with tooling decisions that might have made sense a few years ago, but no longer support their long-term strategy. Worse, they lose leverage. They pay more. And they get less.

That’s not how we operate.

We believe customers should be able to shape their observability architecture around their business needs — not their vendors’ business models. We believe observability should be composable. That the market should reward best-in-class solutions, not bundled mediocrity. And that means giving customers the freedom to move. To evolve. To choose.

That’s what OpenTelemetry enables.

Customer choice is a core feature

By building on OpenTelemetry, we remove a classic vendor safety net: the idea that once you’re in, it’s hard to leave. That’s a safety net we don’t want.

We appreciate the tension that OTel introduces. Because when customers can move freely, vendors have to deliver real value, every day. That’s the right kind of pressure. It aligns everyone, both vendors and customers alike, around the outcomes that matter: performance, impact, trust.

Our view is simple. If we’re not making our customers wildly successful, we don’t deserve to keep them. OpenTelemetry makes that reality tangible.

Interoperability without compromise

Building on OpenTelemetry doesn’t mean we’ve ceded control of our product experience. Far from it. It means we’ve architected our platform to meet customers where they are, whether that’s fully OTel-native, exploring a migration path, or just beginning the journey.

Embrace is built to work in modern, flexible, and evolving environments. We believe in portability without performance loss. In openness without sacrificing insight. And we’ve invested heavily to ensure that you can integrate deep user insights into your existing observability systems, so that everyone makes decisions based on how performance and reliability actually impact end-users.

We’re not here to replace your stack. We’re here to complete it.

A big part of the observability narrative has been about consolidation: single-vendor platforms, all-in-one dashboards, bundled everything. There’s a place for that. But too often, it comes with tradeoffs.

At Embrace, we take a different view. We don’t believe we need to replace everything to deliver value. In fact, we assume you already have great tools in place.

Our job is to fill the gap that nearly every stack still has: the gap in real user observability. What actually happens in the hands of the user. On the device. In the browser. At the edge.

That’s where we start. And with OpenTelemetry, we can make that visibility work alongside whatever else you’ve already built.

It’s not just philosophy. It’s product.

OpenTelemetry isn’t a marketing angle. It’s in our DNA.

We’re actively contributing to the OTel mobile and web spec. We’re supporting hybrid instrumentation. We’re helping customers migrate their telemetry without rewriting everything. And we’re doing it in service of one outcome – enabling better business decisions through better user experience data.

Embrace wants customer partnerships where we both win and where our incentive is to make our customers wildly successful. That’s the heart of our approach.

Wherever you are on the OTel journey, we’re with you

Some of our customers are all-in on OpenTelemetry. Others are just beginning to explore it. Many are somewhere in between.

Wherever you are, we’ll meet you there. We’ll help you build. We’ll help you migrate. Or we’ll simply help you get visibility into the user experience no matter how your telemetry is wired up today.

We’re not dogmatic about how you get value from Embrace. We’re pragmatic about making sure you do.

What this means internally

For our team at Embrace, OpenTelemetry isn’t a differentiator. It’s a responsibility. It holds us to a higher standard. It means we can’t rely on lock-in. We have to earn it.

That’s a discipline we embrace.

We believe that the best companies don’t compete by owning the whole stack. They compete by delivering undeniable value in the parts they do own.

That’s our bet. And we’re confident it’s the right one.

So what comes next?

OpenTelemetry is evolving fast. The ecosystem is maturing. Standards are strengthening. And adoption is accelerating.

We’re going to stay on the frontlines. We’ll keep contributing. Keep building. Keep listening.

And we’ll keep doing what we’ve always done: Help our customers get better at delivering fast, flawless, business-critical user experiences.

OpenTelemetry gives us the architecture to do that. Embrace gives you the power to act on it.