# From OTel to Rotel: Petabyte-scale tracing with 4x greater throughput

DevFeed: [From OTel to Rotel: Petabyte-scale tracing with 4x greater throughput](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/from-otel-to-rotel-petabyte-scale-tracing-with-4x-greater-throughput-5476.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://clickhouse.com/blog/otel-to-rotel-petabyte-scaling-tracing-4x-greater-throughput>)

Author: Mike Heffner, Ray Jenkins

Published: 2025-11-25T14:13:27Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [ClickHouse Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/clickhouse-blog.md>)

Topics: [OpenTelemetry](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/opentelemetry.md>), [tracing](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/tracing.md>), [clickhouse](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/clickhouse.md>), [benchmarking](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/benchmarking.md>), [observability](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/observability.md>), [Rust](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/rust.md>), [Kafka](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/kafka.md>), [Streaming](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/streaming.md>)

Tags: [benchmarking](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/benchmarking.md>), [clickhouse](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/clickhouse.md>), [efficiency](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/efficiency.md>), [kafka](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/kafka.md>), [observability](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/observability.md>), [opentelemetry](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/opentelemetry.md>), [performance](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/performance.md>), [rust](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/rust.md>), [tracing](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/tracing.md>)

## AI overview

This guest post describes benchmarking OpenTelemetry pipelines that send tracing data through Kafka into ClickHouse. It compares the OpenTelemetry Collector with Rotel, an open-source Rust project, and reports that Rotel achieves 462K trace spans per second per core versus 137K for the OpenTelemetry Collector, highlighting resource efficiency and infrastructure-cost implications at petabyte scale.

## Source excerpt

Read how Streamfold's Rotel pushes OpenTelemetry 4x faster into ClickHouse - benchmarking efficiency at scale and revealing the tools that make it happen