OpenTelemetry is not designed to replace commercial observability platforms such as New Relic, Datadog, or Dynatrace. Instead, it is intended to be used in conjunction with these platforms to provide a consistent and vendor-neutral way to instrument, collect, and analyze telemetry data from your application.
OpenTelemetry provides a set of APIs, libraries, and collector services that can be used to collect traces, metrics, and contextual information from your application, regardless of the underlying infrastructure or cloud provider. These commercial observability platforms, such as DataDog, New Relic, and Dynatrace, provide additional features such as visualization, alerting, and advanced analytics, which are not part of the OpenTelemetry project.
This means that you can use OpenTelemetry to collect and send telemetry data to these commercial platforms, so you can use their visualization, alerting and analytics capabilities. This provides you with the best of both worlds: the consistency, extensibility and vendor-neutrality of OpenTelemetry, and the advanced features of commercial platforms.
Additionally, OpenTelemetry is an open-source project, which means that you can access the source code and customize it to suit your needs. This allows you to add custom instrumentation to your application and track the specific metrics that are important to your business.
In summary, OpenTelemetry is not meant to replace existing commercial observability platforms, but rather to complement them and provide a standard way to collect, analyze and share telemetry data.