Why the world OpenTelemetr y

BY J E N N A SA R G E N T BA R R O N

sions and across different signal types,” said Parker “OpenTelemetry is a project whose time has come in terms of providing a single, well-supported, vend o r- a g n o s t i c s o l u t i o n f o r m a k i n g telemetry a built-in part of cloud native systems ”

Morgan McLean, director of product management at Splunk and cofounder of OpenTelemetry, has seen first-hand how the project has exploded in use as it becomes more mature He explained that a year ago, he was having conversations with prospective users who at the time felt like OpenTelemetry didn’t meet all of their needs Now with a more complete feature set, “it’s become a thing that organizations are now much more comfortable and confident using,” Morgan explained.

Today when he meets with someone to tell them about OpenTelemetry, often they will say they’re already using it.

“OpenTelemetry is maybe the best starting point in that it has universal support from all vendors,” said Xanthos “It’s a very robust set of, let’s say, standards and open source implementation So first of all, I know that it will be something that will be around for a while It is, let’s say, the state of the art on how to instrument applications and collect data And it’s supported universally So essentially, I’m betting on something that is a standard accepted across the industry, that is probably going to be around for a while, and gives me control over the data ”

It’s not just the enterprise that has jumped on board with OpenTelemetry; the open-source community as a whole has also embraced it.

Now there are a number of web frameworks, programming languages, and libraries stating their support for OpenTelemetry. For example, Open-

Telemetry is now integrated into NET, Parker explained

Having a healthy open-source ecosystem crucial to success

There are a lot of vendors in the observa b i l i t y s p a c e , a n d O p e n Te l e m e t r y “threatens the moat around most of the existing vendors in the space, ” said Parker It has taken a lot of work to build a community that brings in people that work for those companies and have them say “hey, here’s what we ’ re going to do together to make this a better experience for our end users, regardless o f w h i c h c o m m e r c i a l s o l u t i o n t h e y might pick, or which open-source project they’re using,” said Parker.

According to Xanthos, the reason an open-source standard has become the de facto and not something from a vendor is because of demand from end users.

“End users essentially are asking vendors to have open-source standardsbased data collection, so that they can have more effective observability tools, and they can have control over the data,” said Xanthos “So because of this demand from end users, essentially all vendors either decided or were forced to support OpenTelemetry So essentially, there is no major vendor and observability that doesn’t support it today ”

OpenTelemetry’s governance committee seats are tied to people, not companies, which is the case for some other open-source projects as well

“We try to be cognizant of the fact that we all work for people that have commercial interests here, but at the end of the day, we ’ re people and we are not avatars of our corporate overlords,” said Parker

For example, Morgan and Parker work for two separate companies which are direct competitors to each other, but in the OpenTelemetry space they come together to do things for the project like form end-user working groups or running events.

“It doesn’t matter who signs the paycheck,” Parker said. “We are all in this space for a reason. It’s because we believe that by enabling observability f o r o u r e n d u s e r s t h r o u g h O p e nTelemetry, we are going to make their professional lives better, we ’ re going to help them work better, and make that world of work better ”

What’s next?

OpenTelemetry has a lot planned for the future, and recently published an official project roadmap

The original promise of OpenTelemetry back when it was first announced was to deliver capabilities to allow people to capture distributed traces and metrics from applications and infrastructure, then send that data to a backend analytics system for processing

The project has largely achieved that, which presents the opportunity to sit down and ask what comes next.

For example, logging is something important to a large portion of the community so that is one focus. “We want to be able to capture logs as an adjacent signal type to distributed traces and to metrics,” said Morgan.

Another long-term focus will be capturing profiles from applications so that developers can delve into the performance of their code

The maintainers are also working on c l i e n t i n s t r u m e n t a t i o n T h e y w a n t OpenTelemetry to be able to extract data from web, mobile, and desktop applications

“OpenTelemetry is very focused on back end infrastructure, back end services, the stuff that people run inside of AW S o r A z u r e o r G C P, ” M o r g a n explained “There’s also a need to monitor the performance and get crash reports from their client applications, like front end websites or mobile applications or desktop applications, so they can judge the true end to end performance of everything that they’ve built, not just the parts that are running in various data centers.”

The promise of unified telemetry

At the end of the day, it’s important to remember the main goal of the project, which is to unify telemetry. Developers and operators are dealing with increasing amounts of data, and OpenTelemetry’s purpose is to unify those streams of data and be able to do something with it

P a r k e r n o t e d t h e i m p o r t a n c e o f using this data to deliver great user e x p e r i e n c e s C u s t o m e r s d o n ’t c a r e whether you ’ re using Kubernetes or OpenTelemetry, he said

“Am I able to buy this PS5? Am I able to really easily put my shopping list into this app and order my groceries for the week?” According to Parker this is what really matters to customers, not what technology is making this happen

“OpenTelemetry is a foundational component of tying together application and system performance with end user experiences,” said Parker “That is going to be the next generation of perf o r m a n c e m o n i t o r i n g f o r e v e r y o n e This isn’t focused on just the enterprise; this isn’t a particular vertical. This, to me, is going to be a 30 year project almost, in terms of the horizon, where you can definitely see OpenTelemetry being part of how we think about these questions for many years to come. ” z