This is an anonymized career engagement. The client is anonymized to protect confidentiality; full case detail and references are shared under NDA.
OpenTelemetry Migration
Migrated 200+ services from proprietary APM to OpenTelemetry pipelines. Reduced ingest costs by 42% while preserving full trace fidelity.
Outcome at a Glance
The Challenge
A Fortune 50 technology company was locked into a proprietary APM agent across 200+ services. Annual ingest costs had crossed $4M and were forecast to double in two years. They needed a vendor-neutral path forward without losing any of the observability they'd built.
- Vendor lock-in: Proprietary instrumentation made every service migration a re-platforming exercise.
- Runaway ingest: 100% trace capture on services that didn't need it; high-cardinality attributes inflating storage.
- Zero-tolerance for trace gaps: Several teams used distributed traces as their primary debugging tool — a regression in trace fidelity was a non-starter.
- Multi-language complexity: Services in Go, Java, Python, Node, and Rust — each needing its own OTel SDK strategy.
Our Approach
OTel collector architecture
8-collector deployment in a gateway-and-agent topology, with regional aggregators and tail-sampling decision tier.
- • Sidecar agents for trace generation
- • Gateway collectors for sampling decisions
- • Backend exporters with vendor abstraction
Tail-based sampling
Replaced head-based 100% capture with tail sampling that keeps every error and slow trace, drops uninteresting fast-success traces.
- • 100% retention on errors and slow traces
- • Service-tier-based sampling rates
- • Per-route policy overrides
Per-language SDK rollout
Standardized auto-instrumentation packages and reference services per language, with paved-path templates for new services.
- • Auto-instrumentation defaults
- • Internal SDK wrappers for context propagation
- • Reference services per language
Parallel-run validation
Ran legacy and OTel pipelines side-by-side per service for a 2-week validation window before cutover. Zero trace regressions hit production.
- • Trace-completeness regression tests
- • Cardinality budgets enforced in CI
- • Phased per-service cutover
Detailed Results
Before
- • ~$4M annual ingest cost
- • 100% trace capture on all services
- • Single-vendor lock-in
- • Proprietary instrumentation per language
After
- • 42% reduction in annual ingest cost
- • Tail-sampled with full error retention
- • Vendor-neutral pipeline (OTLP)
- • Standardized OTel auto-instrumentation
Considering an OTel migration?
Most OTel migrations regress on trace quality and break debug workflows. We do them without that.
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