I've used OpenTelemetry since it's original alpha in 2020. Originally the main issue i had was supporting tracing across common libraries (there wasn't a lot of libraries supported back then). Now (and i recently worked with it) i would say is which protocol is supported by which component: your sdk generate spans/metrics in a specific format, then you send that to a collector that accept a range of protocol versions and finally you can send that to your vendor ... but you need to know which protocol/version it supports.
That's not actually something you can do much about considering the sheer size of opentelemetry (both in term of implementation and vendors working on it) and i expect for people implementing nowadays, proto should be pretty stable and my experience should theorically not be the case anymore.
That's not actually something you can do much about considering the sheer size of opentelemetry (both in term of implementation and vendors working on it) and i expect for people implementing nowadays, proto should be pretty stable and my experience should theorically not be the case anymore.