M3 vs OpenTelemetry: What are the differences?

1. Integration with APM Tools: M3 integrates natively with various application performance monitoring (APM) tools, providing out-of-the-box compatibility for metrics, traces, and logs. On the other hand, OpenTelemetry is an open-source project that aims to provide a vendor-agnostic approach to observability, allowing users to choose their preferred APM tools for instrumentation.

2. Storage Backends: M3 comes with its own storage backend that is highly optimized for time series data processing and can handle massive scale. In contrast, OpenTelemetry does not provide a specific storage backend but offers exporters to various data stores, giving users the flexibility to choose the most suitable storage solution for their use case.

3. Language Support: M3 provides support for multiple programming languages, including Go, Java, and Python, with client libraries for easy instrumentation. OpenTelemetry also offers multi-language support but has a broader language range, covering more languages such as JavaScript, Ruby, and PHP.

4. Community Support: While M3 has a strong community backing with contributions from companies like Uber, OpenTelemetry is a CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) project that enjoys the support of a broader community, including major tech players like Google, Microsoft, and Red Hat.

5. Purpose: M3 is primarily focused on monitoring and observability for large-scale distributed systems and is optimized for high performance and scalability. OpenTelemetry, on the other hand, aims to standardize observability instrumentation across different platforms and is more focused on providing a uniform approach to telemetry data collection.

6. Deployment Flexibility: M3 is often deployed in self-managed environments or as a hosted service, offering users control over their infrastructure. OpenTelemetry can be deployed in various environments, including cloud platforms, on-premises setups, and hybrid architectures, making it adaptable to different deployment scenarios.

In Summary, M3 and OpenTelemetry differ in terms of APM tool integration, storage backends, language support, community backing, focus on observability, and deployment flexibility.