You might have heard about OpenTelemetry, found it interesting and want to get involved, but the path to contribution isn’t immediately clear. You might start messaging people asking to get assigned to issues, or just give a shout out saying “I’m here to help, just let me know”, but you never hear back. So how can you actually start contributing to OpenTelemetry? Open source thrives on community, mutual support, and the collaborative development of innovative technology. It also comes...| Blog on OpenTelemetry
Metrics are the quantitative backbone of observability—the numbers that tell us how our systems are performing. This is the third post in our OpenTelemetry naming series, where we’ve already explored how to name spans and how to enrich them with meaningful attributes. Now let’s tackle the art of naming the measurements that matter. Unlike spans that tell stories about what happened, metrics tell us about quantities: how many, how fast, how much. But here’s the thing—naming them well...| Blog on OpenTelemetry
In almost every established enterprise, there’s THAT one system. It’s the one running in the corner, performing a critical function for years. It’s reliable, but it’s also a complete black box. No one wants to touch it for fear of breaking it, and the original developers are long gone. It could be a core banking ledger from the 90s, a logistics routing engine in a warehouse, or a data aggregator on a factory floor. You know it works because, well, it hasn’t failed… yet.| OpenTelemetry
Welcome to the second installment in our series on OpenTelemetry naming best practices. In our previous post, we explored how to name spans using the {verb} {object} pattern. Today, we’re diving into span attributes—the rich contextual data that transforms your traces from simple operation logs into powerful debugging and analysis tools. This guide targets developers who are: Instrumenting their own applications with custom spans and attributes Enriching telemetry beyond what auto-instrum...| Blog on OpenTelemetry
Did you know that OpenTelemetry has had more than 23,000 contributors—that’s individuals who shared issues, commits, pull requests, or comments on GitHub—since the project started? We always encourage everyone to get involved, whether that’s by joining one of our (many!) CNCF Slack channels, or dropping into any public meeting to listen in and share different perspectives. This openness is one of our greatest strengths, but it also means we get a firehose of feedback via many differen...| OpenTelemetry
One of the most fundamental yet often overlooked aspects of good instrumentation is naming. This post is the first in a series dedicated to the art and science of naming things in OpenTelemetry. We’ll start with spans, the building blocks of a distributed trace, and give you the most important takeaway right at the beginning: how to name the spans that describe your unique business logic. Naming your business spans While OpenTelemetry’s automatic instrumentation is fantastic for covering ...| Blog on OpenTelemetry
In the latest session of OTel in Practice, engineers Huxing Zhang and Steve Rao shared Alibaba’s journey adopting OpenTelemetry within their services. The discussion focused on a wide range of topics, from Java agents to Go compile-time instrumentation, and of course Gen-AI observability! Focusing on Java, Alibaba initially used an in-house solution based on Pinpoint, but faced limitations with framework support and asynchronous context propagation. It was then that they decided to migrate ...| OpenTelemetry
On May 29th, 2025, I wrapped up my mentorship with Prometheus through the Linux Foundation Mentorship Program. My project focused on understanding how Prometheus handles OpenTelemetry resource attributes and how that experience could be improved for users. My job was to conduct user research to get the user perspective on this challenge. In three months, I conducted user and stakeholder interviews, ran a survey, and analyzed the findings. In this article, I’ll share how I conducted the rese...| OpenTelemetry
TL;DR OpenTelemetry Weaver helps teams build observability by design, enabling consistent, type-safe, and automated telemetry through semantic conventions. With Weaver, you can define, validate, and evolve your telemetry schemas, ensuring reliability and clarity across your systems. Why consistency matters: Enter semantic conventions Have you ever experienced… A deployment that breaks existing alerts or dashboards because a metric name changed? Writing overly complex queries because teams u...| Blog on OpenTelemetry
As OpenTelemetry adoption grows across infrastructure and application layers, easing the operational burden of instrumentation remains a shared priority. Today, we’re excited to highlight a recent donation from Splunk to the OpenTelemetry community: a host-based mechanism to automatically inject OpenTelemetry Automatic Instrumentation into your app on any Linux host. This component has reached production stability and is now being donated to the community as the OpenTelemetry Injector. It h...| OpenTelemetry
