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Open Telemetry VS Apache APISIX

Compare Open Telemetry VS Apache APISIX and see what are their differences

Open Telemetry logo Open Telemetry

An observability framework for cloud-native software.

Apache APISIX logo Apache APISIX

Apache APISIX is a dynamic, real-time, high-performance Cloud-Native API gateway, based on the Nginx library and etcd.
  • Open Telemetry Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-27
  • Apache APISIX Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-06-27

Open Telemetry features and specs

  • Standardization
    OpenTelemetry provides a standardized set of APIs, libraries, and agents for collecting traces, metrics, and logs, helping to ensure consistency across different platforms and tools.
  • Vendor-neutrality
    OpenTelemetry is vendor-agnostic, allowing you to integrate with various backends, reducing lock-in with any specific monitoring solution.
  • Extensibility
    Its modular architecture allows developers to extend its functionalities easily, with support for custom instrumentation and exporters.
  • Community Support
    Being part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), OpenTelemetry benefits from a large, active community contributing to its development and providing support.
  • Ease of Integration
    Pre-built instrumentation libraries and SDKs for multiple languages simplify the process of integrating telemetry into your applications.

Possible disadvantages of Open Telemetry

  • Complexity
    The broad scope of OpenTelemetry, which includes tracing, metrics, and logging, can make it complex to understand and configure correctly.
  • Performance Overhead
    The process of collecting and exporting telemetry data can introduce performance overhead, which needs to be managed carefully.
  • Evolving Ecosystem
    As an emerging standard, aspects of OpenTelemetry are still under active development and can change, potentially leading to frequent updates and maintenance.
  • Learning Curve
    Engineers might face a steep learning curve when adopting OpenTelemetry due to its comprehensive nature and the need to understand various components and best practices.
  • Limited Maturity of Some Components
    Some of the libraries and features may not be fully mature yet, potentially leading to bugs or incomplete implementations in certain environments or languages.

Apache APISIX features and specs

  • High Performance
    Apache APISIX is built on top of Nginx and designed to handle thousands of requests per second. This makes it suitable for high-performance applications and services requiring efficient request processing.
  • Dynamic Configuration
    APISIX allows for dynamic load balancing, routing, and plugin configuration without the need to restart or reload the service, offering robust flexibility and reducing downtime.
  • Extensive Plugin Ecosystem
    APISIX offers a wide range of plugins to extend its functionalities, covering authentication, security, traffic control, and more, allowing for customization and scalability.
  • Open Source and Community-driven
    Being an Apache project, APISIX is open-source and actively maintained by a community of contributors, ensuring continuous improvement and support.
  • Multi-language Support
    APISIX supports multi-language plugins such as Java, Go, and Python, thereby allowing developers to write plugins in the language they are most comfortable with.

Possible disadvantages of Apache APISIX

  • Complexity of Setup
    Setting up Apache APISIX can be complex for new users, requiring familiarity with Nginx and understanding its configuration model, which might involve a steep learning curve.
  • Documentation Gaps
    While the project is actively improved, some users might experience gaps or inconsistencies in the documentation, posing challenges during setup and customization.
  • Limited Enterprise Support
    Compared to some commercial API management solutions, APISIX might lack dedicated enterprise-level support, which could be a concern for organizations requiring rapid troubleshooting and expert assistance.
  • Evolving Features
    As a relatively new project, some features and components may still be evolving, which means users may encounter changes that require adaptation and adjustments over time.

Open Telemetry videos

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Apache APISIX videos

Getting started with Apache APISIX Dashboard

More videos:

  • Review - Getting started with Apache APISIX
  • Review - APIs security with Apache APISIX

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Open Telemetry and Apache APISIX)
Monitoring Tools
79 79%
21% 21
Performance Monitoring
100 100%
0% 0
API Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Log Management
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Open Telemetry should be more popular than Apache APISIX. It has been mentiond 190 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Open Telemetry mentions (190)

  • Log me Baby
    All these aspects are normally handled by the log forwarding daemon, but in this case, we have to take care of them while making sure we don't drop any logs or crash the application. To my delight, the OpenTelemetry project has made great advances. And this feels like the right time to jump into it. - Source: dev.to / 4 days ago
  • If You Can’t Observe It 🔭, You Can’t Operate It
    In this episode, we’ll integrate OpenTelemetry with our ASP.NET minimal API and trace everything from database calls to cache hits — all visualized in Jaeger. We’ll also learn how to spot inefficiencies, validate cache behavior, and instrument our code for insights. - Source: dev.to / 3 days ago
  • 10 open-source MCPs that make your AI agents smarter than your team lead
    OpenTelemetry if you’re building at serious scale. - Source: dev.to / 8 days ago
  • Working with OpenTelemetry Metrics
    Then I stumbled upon OpenTelemetry. It is a project that aims to provide a unified way to collect, process and export telemetry data. From a hundred thousand feet, it looks like they know what they are doing: standardized data definitions and protocols, semantic conventions, etc. To me, it is like a rulebook for telemetry data --something I find reassuring to rely on. - Source: dev.to / 12 days ago
  • Pomerium’s OpenTelemetry Tracing Support: Deeper Observability, Made Easy
    OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework that standardizes how applications collect, process, and export telemetry data such as metrics, traces, and logs. It’s the successor to OpenCensus and OpenTracing, and is now the de facto industry standard for modern observability. - Source: dev.to / 16 days ago
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Apache APISIX mentions (71)

  • Announcing Integration between Apache APISIX and open-appsec WAF
    Apache APISIX is a modern, flexible, and high-performance open-source API gateway solution designed to handle various use cases in microservices and cloud-native architectures. Its primary purpose is to facilitate API management by serving as a gateway for managing, securing, and optimizing API traffic between clients and backend services. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • open-source API gateway solutions and their managed offerings.
    Kong and APISIX, two popular open-source #APIGateway solutions. #kong looks versatile Unified Gateway but how it fares against #APISIX backed by a similar enterprise API7 offering. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Free tier API with Apache APISIX
    Lots of service providers offer a free tier of their service. The idea is to let you kick their service's tires freely. If you need to go above the free tier at any point, you'll likely stay on the service and pay. In this day and age, most services are online and accessible via an API. Today, we will implement a free tier with Apache APISIX. - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
  • OpenResty on NixOS for an API Gateway
    We have been using Apache APISIX for a while now. It is a high-performance, cloud-native API gateway solution. It also has a nice dashboard for managing APIs. However, I have been looking for a simpler and more portable solution for our use case. In particular, I want to be able manage the API gateway as a NixOS service so that the configuration can be tested and redeployed easily. - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
  • Advanced URL rewriting with Apache APISIX
    I spoke at Swiss PgDay in Switzerland in late June. The talk was about how to create a no-code API with the famous PostgreSQL database, the related PostgREST, and Apache APISIX, of course. I already wrote about the idea in a previous post. However, I wanted to improve it, if only slightly. - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Open Telemetry and Apache APISIX, you can also consider the following products

SigNoz - Open source alternative to Datadog

Prometheus - An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

API7 cloud - API management platform for hybrid and multi-cloud

Grafana - Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases

etcd - A distributed, reliable key-value store for the most critical data of a distributed system

Zipkin - Zipkin is a distributed tracing system.