Glossary · Observability
What Is OTLP?
Written by
Amber Jain
Published
May 2026
Reading time
4 min read
OTLP is the single protocol that carries all your OpenTelemetry data, replacing a zoo of per-vendor formats.
OTLP (the OpenTelemetry Protocol) is the standard wire protocol OpenTelemetry uses to transport telemetry, traces, metrics and logs, between SDKs, the Collector and observability backends, over gRPC or HTTP using protocol buffers.
What OTLP does
OTLP defines how telemetry is encoded and transmitted. It carries all three signals in one protocol, supports both gRPC and HTTP transports, and uses protobuf for efficient serialisation. An SDK exports over OTLP to a Collector, and the Collector exports over OTLP (or another format) to a backend.
Why a single protocol matters
Having one protocol for traces, metrics and logs means one exporter configuration, one port, one security posture, instead of a different agent and format per signal and per vendor. It is what makes OpenTelemetry data portable: any OTLP-capable backend can receive it unchanged.
How it fits Opstral
Opstral ingests OTLP natively, so any OpenTelemetry-instrumented service or Collector can feed telemetry to Telemetry Ops and Sentinel AI without a proprietary agent.
Frequently asked questions
Does OTLP use gRPC or HTTP?
Both. OTLP supports gRPC and HTTP transports; gRPC is common for high throughput, HTTP is simpler to route through proxies and firewalls.
Is OTLP only for traces?
No. OTLP carries traces, metrics and logs in one protocol, which is a large part of why OpenTelemetry consolidated telemetry transport.