I've looked into OpenCensus/OpenTracing/OpenTelemetry (and the apparently unaffiliated OpenMetrics?) a bit, but I'm not as familiar as I'd like to be. It does seem like they're focused primarily on application-level instrumentation and the ability to ship that metrics and tracing data to different backends.

Vector's perspective is that your applications and infrastructure are already emitting all kinds of interesting data via logs, metrics, etc, and the primary challenge is to collect, enrich, and manage the storage of that data. We have no plans to integrate Vector into your application or introduce some kind of Vector-specific method of exporting data.

We'll definitely be watching OpenTelemetry as it moves forward and would very much like to be a compatible part of that ecosystem. To the degree that they use common open standards for their communication protocols, that could just fall out naturally.