Context Our Elastic journey has been interesting and filled with trial and error. Around every corner we discover a different (and often better) way of doing the same thing, but it usually means redoing large parts of our setup. We’re getting a bit tired of rebuilding everything, so I’m hoping to ge…

For on‑prem deployments, it is recommended to use the EDOT Collector over a vanilla OTel collector, because it reduces mandatory and manual configuration. Yes. It gives you comfort. Using standard OTel tooling with the EDOT Collector results in data being stored in OTel‑native format instead of …

Hi Christoffer, thank you for sharing your observability journey and the questions you have. When using the EDOT Java agent or OTel vanilla you should ingest the data through an EDOT/OTel collector and/or Elastic Cloud Managed OTLP endpoint ( reference architecture ). The details depend on your envi…

Thank you very much for the detailed answer. We are running an on‑prem installation of Elasticsearch and Kibana. I believe most of our software is version 9.1.5. We are currently working on upgrading past 9.2+ as I believe the EDOT collector will be part of the 9.2+ Fleet Agents by default. Though …

I will try to cover your questions in one reply. You didn’t explicitly mention the EDOT Collector, which made me wonder You are right. I did not mention the EDOT Collector explicitly only because I had the impression you are favouring the OTel contrib collector. The benefit of EDOT is that it con…

Again, thank you for your detailed response. To summarize my current understanding, if we want to use standard OpenTelemetry tooling with Elasticsearch and Kibana Observability (assuming the frameworks and tooling follow OpenTelemetry semantic conventions): For on‑prem deployments, it is recomme…

Thank you very much, an excellent reply! Next week we are upgrading from 9.1.x -> 9.3.x and will install the EDOT Collector and move away from the Elastic APM integrations. I have also played around and installed the EDOT Collector in my k3s environment and done some Quarkus testing with the io.qua…

My pleasure :slight_smile: Looking forward to hear about the results. If you are using Kubernetes, consider to utilize the OpenTelemetry Kubernetes Operator ( OTel docs , GitHub ). You may find this resource useful.

Thanks again for the clarification around EDOT and the OTel direction. To make this more concrete for OpenShift-based environments, I’d like to validate whether the following architecture aligns with Elastic’s recommended and supported approach: [OpenShift Cluster] OTel Collector (Operator-mana…

Hi willemdh, the RedHat distro and operator integrates natively with the OpenShift security controls / context constraints and platform. It's a recommended choice to use it. The EDOT collector is supported on OpenShift but is not specialized to it. For Central Ingest / Gateway the EDOT collector o…

A follow up instead of making a new thread. We installed the EDOT Collector and tried to push OTel data from my java application with the elastic-otel-javaagent-1.11.0.jar. Don't remember why but changed the agent to opentelemetry-javaagent.jar instead and had more success. Does it make sense that …

Elastic Observability vs OpenTelemetry: Are We Finally on the "Right" Path?

Elastic Observability

willemdh (WillemDH) April 14, 2026, 5:50pm 3

We have similar concerns. Thanks for this post.

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Elastic Observability vs OpenTelemetry: Are We Finally on the "Right" Path?

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