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.
