What is odigos?

Odigos is an open-source tool that adds distributed tracing to applications running in Kubernetes clusters or virtual machines, without requiring any changes to your code. Distributed tracing is a way to follow a single request as it travels through different parts of a software system, which helps teams find where slowdowns or failures are occurring. The way it works is that Odigos installs into your Kubernetes environment and automatically identifies your running applications. It then attaches monitoring to those apps using a technology called eBPF, which operates at the operating system level rather than inside your application code. Because of this, your source code stays untouched and you do not need to rebuild or redeploy anything. It supports applications written in several common programming languages: Java, Python.NET, Node.js, and Go. Go applications are traditionally difficult to monitor without code modifications because Go compiles directly to machine code, but Odigos handles this through its eBPF approach, which works at a lower level than the application itself. The tracing data Odigos collects follows the OpenTelemetry standard, a widely adopted open format for observability data. This means you can forward that data to monitoring tools you may already use, such as Datadog, Grafana, or Jaeger, without being locked into any single vendor's product. Installation takes under five minutes. You download the Odigos command-line tool, run a single install command, and then use the provided web interface to choose which applications to monitor and where to send the data. Odigos also handles scaling its internal data collectors up or down automatically as traffic volume changes, so you do not need to manage that capacity yourself. The project is maintained by contributors who also work on the OpenTelemetry project, which means its implementation aligns closely with how those open standards work internally.