Since 2019, it has been incubating at the , but the project has its origins in two different open-source projects: OpenCensus and OpenTracing, which were merged into one to form OpenTelemetry.
It has become now the de facto in terms of how companies are willing to instrument their applications and collect data because it gives them flexibility back and theres nothing proprietary, so it helps them move away from data silos, and also helps connect the data end to end to offer more effective observability, said Spiros Xanthos, SVP and general manager of observability at .
OpenTelemetry is one of the most successful open-source projects, depending on what you measure by. According to Austin Parker, head of DevRel at and maintainer of OpenTelemetry, it is the within the CNCF, only behind Kubernetes, in terms of contributions and improvements.
According to Parker, one of the reasons why OpenTelemetry has just exploded in use is that cloud native development and distributed systems have eaten the world. This in turn leads to increased complexity. And what do you need when complexity increases? Observability, visibility, a way to understand what is actually going on in your systems.
RELATED ARTICLE:
Parker feels that for the past few decades, a real struggle companies have run into is that everyone has a different tool for each part of observability. They have a tool for tracing, something for handling logs, something to track metrics, etc.
Theres scaling issues, lack of data portability, lack of vendor agnosticism, and a lack of ability to easily correlate these things across different dimensions and across different signal types, said Parker. OpenTelemetry is a project whose time has come in terms of providing a single, well-supported, vendor-agnostic solution for making telemetry a built-in part of cloud native systems.
Morgan McLean, director of product management at Splunk and co-founder 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 didnt meet all of their needs. Now with a more complete feature set, its 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 theyre already using it.
OpenTelemetry is maybe the best starting point in that it has universal support from all vendors, said Xanthos. Its a very robust set of, lets 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, lets say, the state of the art on how to instrument applications and collect data. And its supported universally. So essentially, Im 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.
Its 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, OpenTelemetry is now integrated into .NET, Parker explained.
Having a healthy open-source ecosystem crucial to successThere are a lot of vendors in the observability space, and OpenTelemetry 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, heres what were going to do together to make this a better experience for our end users, regardless of which commercial solution they might pick, or which open-source project theyre 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 standards-based 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 doesnt support it today.
OpenTelemetrys governance committee seats are tied to people, not companies, which is the case for some other open-source projects as well.