Sentry vs OpenTelemetry: You Don’t Need to Pick One
TL;DR — If your backend already uses OpenTelemetry, you can send traces and logs to Sentry by changing a few environment variables. No SDK swap, no instrumentation rewrite. Point your OTLP exporter at Sentry’s endpoint, add the Sentry SDK on the frontend for browser context, and you get one connected trace from click to backend span. You already instrumented the backend with OpenTelemetry. Your services emit spans. Your teams know the OTel APIs. Maybe you already run a Collector. So when you start evaluating Sentry, the obvious question is: Do you need to replace your OpenTelemetry setup with the Sentry SDK? No. The practical answer is usually: keep OpenTelemetry where it already works, add the Sentry SDK where it gives you more application context, and send OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) events to Sentry. For a web app, that often means using the Sentry SDK on the frontend for browser tracing, errors, logs , Session Replay , and source maps, while keeping OpenTelemetry on the backend for existing service instrumentation. One scope note: OTLP can carry traces, logs, and metrics. At this moment, Sentry’s OTLP ingest supports logs and traces, not metrics. We’re considering adding support for them in the future. The important part is separating two decisions that often get lumped together: How traces stay connected across frontend and backend. How backend OTLP events are exported to Sentry. Once you separate those, the architecture gets a lot easier to reason about. Sentry vs OpenTelemetry is the wrong question The first decision is trace linking. If a user clicks a button in your React app and that click triggers a backend request, the frontend and backend need to agree on the same distributed trace context. In this example, the Sentry frontend SDK sends W3C traceparent headers (configurable through the propagateTraceparent option), and the OpenTelemetry backend continues the trace. That linking is handled by the frontend SDK configuration: Sentry . init ({ integration