Over the past year, Cockroach Labs has been working hard to give our observability tooling some extra love. When it comes to monitoring our cloud products, such as CockroachDB Dedicated, meeting our customers where they are is one of our primary goals. Many organizations already have a platform in place to monitor their systems, and we’d like them to feel right at home when it comes to monitoring their CockroachDB cluster. But with so many platforms available in the ever-changing observability market today, like Datadog, Amazon CloudWatch, and more, how do we stay flexible in our observability tooling? The popular tools of today are not guaranteed to stand the test of time. Therefore, we need a platform for third party monitoring integrations that’s flexible enough to support both the platforms of today, as well as those of tomorrow. For Cockroach Labs, we chose the OpenTelemetry Collector to serve as such a platform and to integrate with Datadog as the first of what we hope to someday be a substantial library of third party integrations. This blog post discusses the capabilities of the OpenTelemetry Collector and how we introduced it into our cloud infrastructure.