OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and More: Which Is Better for Metrics Collection and Propagation?

Prometheus and OpenTelemetry are compared in terms of their efficiency for metrics collection and propagation in cloud-native environments. Prometheus, the established standard, offers simple deployment but struggles with scalability. Enhancements like remote write and agent mode improve performance but still have limitations. OpenTelemetry, with its open-source, vendor-neutral approach, has higher CPU usage and requires more resources. Benchmarks reveal that Prometheus 3.x with remote write 2.0 and zstd compression offers substantial bandwidth savings. VMagent shows promising results with lower resource usage. The adoption of new protocols like OpenTelemetry depends on broader ecosystem support.