With contributions from Dan Gomez Blanco (New Relic). If you’re building self-hosted software or a SaaS product, your users will eventually ask to send logs, traces, and metrics to their own observability stack, whether to satisfy compliance, manage costs, or centralize all their observability data in one place. Locking them into your built-in dashboards or limiting exports to certain vendors creates unnecessary friction. Instead, supporting export to any OpenTelemetry (OTel)-compatible backend is a vendor-neutral, future-proof practice that gives users the freedom to choose their observability stack.