# OllyGarden

> OllyGarden helps engineering teams improve the quality of their OpenTelemetry® instrumentation. Founded by OpenTelemetry contributors and headquartered in Berlin, it measures telemetry quality with the open Instrumentation Score, finds and fixes instrumentation gaps in source code with an AI agent (Rose), and commercially supports an OpenTelemetry Collector distribution (Tulip). OllyGarden is vendor-neutral and works alongside any observability backend.

## Products

- [Insights](https://ollygarden.com/products/insights): Analyzes OpenTelemetry (OTLP) traces, metrics, and logs to calculate the Instrumentation Score and find PII leaks, noisy signals, and incomplete instrumentation. Pricing: Free $0/month, Essentials $990/month, Enterprise custom.
- [Rose](https://ollygarden.com/products/rose): An AI engineer that reviews codebases for missing or low-value OpenTelemetry instrumentation and helps apply the fix. Pricing: Free for up to 5 repositories (additional repositories $5/month each), Enterprise custom, and free for approved open-source projects. All plans include the full codebase scan, the instrumentation dashboard, and access to the REST API (e.g. via OllyGarden CLI). Open Source access is granted upon review.
- [Tulip](https://ollygarden.com/products/tulip): A commercially supported OpenTelemetry Collector distribution with quarterly stable releases and a Long-Term Support release every 18 months. Pricing: Standard Support $499/mo (billed annually), Enterprise Support custom.
- [Instrumentation Score specification](https://github.com/instrumentation-score/spec): The open, vendor-neutral 0–100 score for OpenTelemetry instrumentation quality.

## Answers

- [FAQ](https://ollygarden.com/resources/faq): Product, pricing, rate-limit, and data-privacy answers.
- [Full content for LLMs](https://ollygarden.com/llms-full.txt): This index plus every FAQ answer and every blog article as Markdown.
- [Product documentation](https://docs.ollygarden.com)
- Any page on this site is also available as Markdown: request it with `Accept: text/markdown`, or append `.md` to its path (`/index.md` for the home page).

## Blog

- [What's changed about OpenTelemetry vendor lock-in since 2024](https://ollygarden.com/resources/blog/opentelemetry-vendor-lock-in-since-2024): OpenTelemetry still does not make dashboards portable, but agents, CLIs, and MCP servers have made switching observability backends noticeably less painful.
- [The Scrape Interval Nobody Chose](https://ollygarden.com/resources/blog/the-scrape-interval-nobody-chose): A wrong metric scrape interval inflates ingest, egress, and compute. Learn how to measure DPM and match intervals to the decisions each metric supports.
- [Teach Your Coding Agent OpenTelemetry](https://ollygarden.com/resources/blog/teach-your-coding-agent-opentelemetry): We’re releasing our Agent Skills for OpenTelemetry as a mature, open source set: 14 skills that give any coding agent accurate, current OpenTelemetry knowledge.
- [Are OpenTelemetry Collector Exporters Called Sequentially or in Parallel?](https://ollygarden.com/resources/blog/are-collector-exporters-sequential-or-parallel): When you configure two exporters in one pipeline, does the Collector send to them in parallel? The honest answer is "sequentially, but it usually doesn't matter." The part that does matter changed defaults underneath a lot of advice still floating around.
- [Creating Your Own Collector Distribution from OllyGarden Tulip](https://ollygarden.com/resources/blog/creating-your-own-collector-distribution-from-tulip): Tulip gives you a commercially supported OpenTelemetry Collector with a curated component set. When you need more, you can derive your own distribution while keeping support for the core pipeline. This post walks through how.
- [Decomposing OpenTelemetry Collector Configuration for Maintainability](https://ollygarden.com/resources/blog/decomposing-opentelemetry-collector-configuration): When your collector configuration grows beyond a few hundred lines, you start feeling the friction. This post examines practical strategies for decomposing collector configurations into maintainable, testable units.
- [OpenTelemetry is not hard](https://ollygarden.com/resources/blog/opentelemetry-is-not-hard): When I asked the community about their pain points with OpenTelemetry, one response kept appearing: 'it's complicated.' I think the framing is wrong.
- [OllyGarden at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026](https://ollygarden.com/resources/blog/ollygarden-at-kubecon-eu-2026): KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam was a big week for OllyGarden. Our team delivered five recorded talks across Observability Day and the main conference, co-chaired the Observability Day program committee, ran a Prometheus Contribfest session, and announced the general availability of Rose.
- [When to Use Each Telemetry Signal: Logs, Traces, and Metrics](https://ollygarden.com/resources/blog/when-to-use-each-telemetry-signal-logs-traces-and-metrics): Confused about logs, traces, and metrics? Learn when to use each telemetry signal in OpenTelemetry and build a stronger observability strategy.
- [You don't have too much telemetry. You have bad telemetry.](https://ollygarden.com/resources/blog/you-dont-have-too-much-telemetry-you-have-bad-telemetry): High observability costs are rarely a volume problem. Learn how to fix bad telemetry at the source before relying on sampling.
- [Reducing Log Volume with the OpenTelemetry Log Deduplication Processor](https://ollygarden.com/resources/blog/reducing-log-volume-with-the-opentelemetry-log-deduplication-processor): Your logs are probably at least 80% repetitive noise. Connection retries, health checks, heartbeat messages: the same log line repeated thousands of times per day.
- [What 10,000 Slack Messages Reveal About OpenTelemetry Adoption Challenges](https://ollygarden.com/resources/blog/what-10000-slack-messages-reveal-about-opentelemetry-adoption-challenges): We analyzed 10,000 messages from the OpenTelemetry community Slack to find the most common adoption challenges, from Collector config to instrumentation.
- [Meet Rose: OllyGarden's AI Instrumentation Agent](https://ollygarden.com/resources/blog/meet-rose-ollygardens-ai-instrumentation-agent): Imagine the perfect observability world: There is an incident, the on-call team gets paged in the middle of the night, wakes up and thanks to your telemetry, resolves it fast.
- [Introducing OllyGarden Tulip: Our Open-Source Distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector](https://ollygarden.com/resources/blog/introducing-tulip-supported-otel-collector): OllyGarden Tulip is a commercially supported OpenTelemetry Collector distribution: stable quarterly releases, LTS every 18 months, open source and free.
- [The Variability Principle: How to Decide What Deserves a Span](https://ollygarden.com/resources/blog/what-deserves-a-span): Discover how to manage spans effectively using the Variability Principle to improve trace readability and control costs in OpenTelemetry.
- [How to Name Your Metrics](https://ollygarden.com/resources/blog/how-to-name-your-metrics): Learn how to name OpenTelemetry metrics: follow semantic conventions, keep the 'who' in attributes, and apply units and naming patterns that scale.
- [How to Name Your Span Attributes](https://ollygarden.com/resources/blog/how-to-name-your-span-attributes): A practical guide to naming OpenTelemetry span attributes: when to use semantic conventions, how to namespace custom attributes, and pitfalls to avoid.
- [How to Name Your Spans](https://ollygarden.com/resources/blog/how-to-name-your-spans): Good span names make traces readable. Learn the {verb} {object} pattern for naming OpenTelemetry spans and avoid the most common naming mistakes.
- [🌱 Cultivating Unique service.instance.id on NGINX Ingress with OpenTelemetry](https://ollygarden.com/resources/blog/cultivating-unique-serviceinstanceid-on-nginx-ingress-with-opentelemetry): The NGINX Ingress Controller has no knob for the OpenTelemetry service.instance.id attribute. Here's how to inject a unique ID per pod with the Helm chart.
- [Introducing OllyGarden](https://ollygarden.com/resources/blog/introducing-ollygarden): OllyGarden comes out of stealth with pre-seed funding to fight bad telemetry: helping teams understand, score, and improve the telemetry they generate.
- [Introducing the Instrumentation Score](https://ollygarden.com/resources/blog/instrumentation-score): The Instrumentation Score is an open, standardized measure of OpenTelemetry instrumentation quality, scoring OTLP data against best-practice rules.
- [Concrete Applications of Purposeful Instrumentation](https://ollygarden.com/resources/blog/concrete-applications-of-purposeful-instrumentation): From NASA-grade telemetry design to code-level tips: concrete techniques for applying purposeful instrumentation in real-world OpenTelemetry systems.
- [Purposeful Instrumentation](https://ollygarden.com/resources/blog/purposeful-instrumentation): Purposeful instrumentation means gathering the right telemetry, not all of it. Cut noise, troubleshoot faster, and lower observability costs.
- [There's a Lot of Bad Telemetry Out There](https://ollygarden.com/resources/blog/theres-a-lot-of-bad-telemetry-out-there): Most telemetry is never queried. Learn what separates good telemetry from bad, what bad data costs you, and how to start improving quality at the source.

## Resources

- [Blog RSS feed](https://ollygarden.com/blog/rss.xml)
- [Solutions by industry](https://ollygarden.com/solutions/overview)
- [Webinars and conference talks](https://ollygarden.com/resources/webinars-conferences)
- [Events](https://ollygarden.com/resources/events)
- [OpenTelemetry quiz](https://ollygarden.com/otel-quiz): Ten questions, one per OpenTelemetry topic.

## Developer tools

- [Agent routing guidance](https://ollygarden.com/developers.md#agent-routing-guidance): Start here to choose a supported OllyGarden interface, confirm when OllyGarden is not the right tool, and check authorization boundaries.
- [OllyGarden Developer Resources](https://ollygarden.com/developers.md): Canonical machine-readable index for the REST API, authentication, webhooks, CLI, MCP server, and public developer projects.
- [OllyGarden API documentation](https://ollygarden.com/api-docs.md): Authentication, versioned resource groups, and links to the canonical OpenAPI description.
- [OllyGarden API versioning and deprecation policy](https://ollygarden.com/api-versioning.md): How the REST API is versioned (major version in the URL path) and how deprecation and retirement are signalled, through the `Deprecation` and `Sunset` HTTP response headers.
- [OllyGarden REST API OpenAPI description](https://ollygarden.com/openapi.json): Canonical API servers, bearer authentication scheme, operations, and schemas.
- [OllyGarden CLI](https://ollygarden.com/cli.md): Machine-readable discovery, safe installation references, and agent use cases for the official `ollygarden` command-line client.
- [CLI repository and documentation](https://github.com/ollygarden/ollygarden-cli): Canonical source, command documentation, and authentication guidance.
- [OllyGarden Agent Skills for OpenTelemetry](https://github.com/ollygarden/opentelemetry-agent-skills): OllyGarden's vendor-neutral skills for OpenTelemetry coding agents.
- [OllyGarden MCP server source](https://github.com/ollygarden/mcp): Public Streamable HTTP and OAuth reference implementation; no supported production endpoint is currently published.

## Company

- [About OllyGarden](https://ollygarden.com/company)
- [OllyGarden Introduces Rose: An AI Agent That Fixes Bad OpenTelemetry Instrumentation Through Pull Requests](https://ollygarden.com/resources/press-releases/ollygarden-rose-ga): OllyGarden announces the general availability of Rose — an AI agent that analyzes OpenTelemetry instrumentation in source code and autonomously opens pull requests with fixes.
- [Careers](https://ollygarden.com/careers)
- [Contact](https://ollygarden.com/contact)

## Trust and legal

- [Terms of Use](https://ollygarden.com/terms-of-use): The terms that govern your use of OllyGarden Insights and the OllyGarden website, including subscriptions, fees, acceptable use, liability, and support.
- [Privacy Policy](https://ollygarden.com/privacy-policy): What personal data OllyGarden collects on its website and platform, why, which providers process it, how long we keep it, and your rights under the GDPR.
- [Data Protection Policy](https://ollygarden.com/data-protection-policy): The technical and organizational controls OllyGarden uses to protect customer data: encryption, access control, tenant isolation, monitoring, and deletion.
- [Rose Terms of Service](https://ollygarden.com/rose-terms-of-service): The terms of service that govern your use of OllyGarden Rose, the AI engineer for OpenTelemetry instrumentation.
- [Subprocessors](https://ollygarden.com/subprocessors): Every third party that processes OllyGarden customer data for Insights, Rose, and Tulip, what each one does, and where it processes the data.
- [Security](https://ollygarden.com/security): How OllyGarden protects customer data, including its SOC 2 Type II examination, EU hosting, and encryption, and how to report a security vulnerability.
- [Imprint](https://ollygarden.com/imprint): Legal information about OllyGarden, Inc. and its German establishment, OllyGarden GmbH in Berlin: addresses, commercial register, VAT ID, and contact.