It has been 10 months since the merging of OpenCensus and OpenTracing into the OpenTelemetry project. Since that time, the combined communities have been busy working to take the best from both projects. That hard work has paid off, and I am excited to announce the project has gone beta! Read on to learn more.
Morgan blogged about the announcement last week. Some of the big highlights include:
- The OpenTelemetry Collector: A vendor-agnostic component that can be deployed as an agent or collector and is the recommended destination for instrumentation data.
- Manual client libraries (APIs and SDKs) supporting traces and metrics: Erlang, Go, Java, Javascript, and Python. While .Net and Ruby are not officially beta yet, they are coming soon!
- Automatic instrumentation for Java: This is the first of many languages to come!
In addition, the client libraries support both W3C trace context as well as exporting in OpenTelemetry format (OTLP). Client libraries may also support other exporters, including Jaeger, Zipkin, and/or Prometheus, but the recommendation is to export to the OpenTelemetry Collector (more on this in a future post).
If you are interested in getting started with OpenTelemetry, then check out the workshop I ran at Observe 20/20. The workshop goes over deploying the Collector as well as instrumenting a polyglot microservices application written in Go, Python, Node, and Java. Best of all, it can be run on Glitch, on Docker, or locally. Check it out, and PRs welcome!
While this is just the beginning, and there is still plenty of work to do, the project is maturing rapidly and is already used by many companies today. Now is a great time to get involved if you are not already! Join the conversation on Gitter, hop on a SIG meeting, or take a look at the “good-first-issue” and “help-wanted” labels on GitHub issues. If you are not following this project, then you are missing out on the future of observability!
© 2020 – 2021, Steve Flanders. All rights reserved.
