OpenTelemetry 1.25 vs. Datadog 2026: Tracing Overhead for 1000 RPS Microservices Workloads Measured

OpenTelemetry 1.25 vs Datadog 2026: Tracing Overhead for 1000 RPS Microservices Workloads Distributed tracing is critical for debugging microservices, but instrumentation overhead can degrade production performance. This benchmark compares OpenTelemetry (OTel) 1.25 and Datadog’s 2026 tracing stack under a sustained 1000 requests per second (RPS) microservices workload to quantify real-world overhead. Test Setup We deployed a 3-service e-commerce microservices stack on Kubernetes (1.29): Frontend