OpenTelemetry: The Vision, Reality, and How to Get Started

OpenTelemetry is a new open-source project that aims to provide a single set of APIs, libraries, agents, and collector services to capture distributed traces, metrics, and logs.

• OpenTelemetry supports metric pipelines and has Prometheus support.
• The auto collector has receivers and exporters in Prometheus formats.
• OpenTelemetry is working on adding logging support.
• The API is still in draft, but the focus is on getting a specification for a strongly typed and machine-readable format for logs.
• OpenTelemetry has a new working group for client instrumentation.
• The OpenTelemetry collector supports the Prometheus format, and you can use Prometheus as a back-end.
• The future of OpenTelemetry includes making the operational side easier and adding more signals beyond logs, metrics, and tracing.

OpenTelemetry is a collaboration under the CNCF, and the SDK has exporters in Prometheus format. The OpenTelemetry collector supports metric pipelines and has receivers and exporters in Prometheus formats. The focus is on getting a specification for a strongly typed and machine-readable format for logs. OpenTelemetry has a new working group for client instrumentation, which aims to instrument web pages, web apps, and mobile apps. The future of OpenTelemetry includes making the operational side easier and adding more signals beyond logs, metrics, and tracing.

Everyone wants observability into their system, but find themselves with too many vendors and tools, each with its own API, SDK, agents and collectors. In this talk Horovits will present OpenTelemetry, an ambitious open source project with the promise of a unified framework for collecting observability data. With OpenTelemetry you could instrument your application in a vendor-agnostic way, and then analyze the telemetry data in your backend tool of choice, whether Prometheus, Jaeger, Zipkin, or others. Horovits will cover the current state of the various projects comprising OpenTelemetry (across programming languages, exporters, receivers, protocols and more), some of which are not even GA yet, and provide practical guidance on how to get started with OpenTelemetry in your own system.Click here to view captioning/translation in the MeetingPlay platform!