You can scale the deployment of OpenTelemetry Collector across multiple Linux hosts through Ansible, to function both as gateways and agents within your observability architecture. Using the OpenTelemetry Collector in this dual capacity enables a robust collection and forwarding of metrics, traces, and logs to analysis and visualization platforms. We outline a strategy for deploying and managing the OpenTelemetry Collector’s scalable instances throughout your infrastructure using Ansible. I...| OpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry is happy to announce the completion of the Collector’s fuzzing audit sponsored by the CNCF and carried out by Ada Logics. The audit marks a significant step in the OpenTelemetry project, ensuring the security and reliability of the Collector for its users. What is fuzzing? Fuzzing is a testing technique that executes an API with a high amount of pseudo-random inputs and observes the API’s behavior. The technique has increased in popularity due to its empirical success in fin...| OpenTelemetry
We’re back with our third edition of Humans of OpenTelemetry, this time from KubeCon NA in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. Once again, Reese Lee and I interviewed OpenTelemetry contributors and end users (and each other!), and learned how they got involved with OTel: Hazel Weakly (The Nivenly Foundation) Eromosele Akhigbe (Sematext) Budha Bhattacharya (Tyk) Miguel Luna (Elastic) Adriana Villela (Dynatrace) David Gohberg (Monday) Endre Sara (Causely) Braydon Kains (Google) Christos Markou (Elasti...| OpenTelemetry
The OpenTelemetry End-User SIG recently surveyed the community to find out how user-friendly OpenTelemetry’s documentation is. In an earlier survey, two-thirds of respondents named comprehensive documentation as a top resource they wished they’d had when getting started with OpenTelemetry. So we decided to dig a little deeper. The Docs Usability Survey asked users where they go for OTel documentation, what they’d like to see more of in the docs, and how they rate the current state of th...| OpenTelemetry
As 2024 draws to a close, we reflect on the year and share some insights and accomplishments from SIG Communications, the team responsible for managing this website, blog, and documentation. Key achievements of 2024 Several key accomplishments stand out in our efforts to make OpenTelemetry documentation more accessible, user-friendly, and impactful for our global community. Multilingual documentation A major accomplishment this year was achieving multilingual support with the launch of our lo...| OpenTelemetry
If you want to get logs from your Java application ingested into an OpenTelemetry-compatible logs backend, the easiest and recommended way is using an OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP) exporter. However, some scenarios require logs to be output to files or stdout due to organizational or reliability needs. A common approach to centralize logs is to use unstructured logs, parse them with regular expressions, and add contextual attributes. However, regular expression parsing is problematic. They be...| OpenTelemetry
As organizations increasingly adopt Large Language Models (LLMs) and other generative AI technologies, ensuring reliable performance, efficiency, and safety is essential to meet user expectations, optimize resource costs, and safeguard against unintended outputs. Effective observability for AI operations, behaviors, and outcomes can help meet these goals. OpenTelemetry is being enhanced to support these needs specifically for generative AI. Two primary assets are in development to make this p...| OpenTelemetry
The OpenTelemetry project maintainers, members of the governance committee, and technical committee are thrilled to be at KubeCon NA in Salt Lake City from November 12 - 15, 2024. Read on to learn about all the things related OpenTelemetry during KubeCon. OpenTelemetry Contribfest Join the OpenTelemetry maintainers for the OpenTelemetry Contribfest to make the project better for everyone. You can choose between several opportunities to contribute, and you can count on maintainers from differe...| OpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry is a community-driven project, fueled by a group of awesome humans who are actively revolutionizing the field of observability with their contributions. Whether it’s through code, documentation, project management, outreach, adoption, or simply helping others answer technical questions on our CNCF Slack, we want to recognize these contributions and the people behind them – because we’re all human, and we all like that warm fuzzy feeling of appreciation. We are thrilled to ...| OpenTelemetry
A little over six months ago, OpenTelemetry announced support for the profiling signal. While the signal is still in development and isn’t yet recommended for production use, the Profiling SIG has made substantial progress on many fronts. This post provides a summary of the progress the Profiling SIG has made over the past six months. OTLP improvements Profiles were added as a new signal type to OTLP in v1.3.0, though this area is still marked as unstable as we continue to make changes to it.| OpenTelemetry
The OpenTelemetry Protocol with Apache Arrow (OTel-Arrow) project’s exporter and receiver components for the OpenTelemetry Collector are now included in OpenTelemetry Collector-Contrib releases. This is a case study of our experience deploying OpenTelemetry Collectors using OTel-Arrow components as the primary ingestion path for internal telemetry data at ServiceNow Cloud Observability. Since F5, Inc.’s initial contribution to the OpenTelemetry project, community members, including those ...| OpenTelemetry
Tools such as Prometheus and OpenTelemetry help us monitor the health, performance, and availability of our complex distributed systems. Both are open source projects under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) umbrella – but what role does each play in observability? OpenTelemetry (OTel for short), is a vendor-neutral open standard for instrumenting, generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry data. Prometheus is a fixture of the observability landscape, widely relied upon for m...| OpenTelemetry
The OpenTelemetry project is excited to announce the 2024 OpenTelemetry Governance Committee (GC) election. Nominations are due by 11 October 2024 23:59 UTC. The list of eligible candidates will be shared on 14 October 2024. Voting will take place between 21 October 2024 00:00 UTC and 23 October 2024 23:59 UTC, and the final election results will be announced 25 October 2024. Vote! If you are a member of standing in the OpenTelemetry community, we invite you to participate with your vote in t...| OpenTelemetry
As a principal engineer at Grafana Labs, my focus is on OpenTelemetry: writing code or maintaining OTel Collector components and tooling, helping out with our recent security audit, and building bridges between people with similar ideas — all with the ultimate goal of helping the OTel community, as a whole, succeed. For nearly three years now, I’ve also been a member of the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee (GC). I was first elected in October 2021, and then re-elected in October 2023 fo...| OpenTelemetry
Prometheus and OpenTelemetry are two of the most active and popular projects in the CNCF observability landscape. The two communities have been working together since the early days of OpenTelemetry to improve the compatibility between the two projects. The OpenTelemetry Prometheus SIG has been leading this effort, with the active participation of maintainers from both OpenTelemetry and Prometheus. At this point, there is a detailed, experimental specification describing how to convert betwee...| OpenTelemetry
Thousands of organizations and millions of users around the world rely on OpenTelemetry as part of their observability toolkit. To this end, it is our responsibility as a project to ensure our code is safe, secure, and performant. In conjunction with OSTIF and 7ASecurity, and the support of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, we recently engaged upon a security audit of the OpenTelemetry Collector and four SDKs – Go, Java, C#, and Python. We are pleased to announce the publication of thi...| OpenTelemetry
The OpenTelemetry Collector recently went through a security audit sponsored by the CNCF, facilitated by OSTIF, and performed by 7ASecurity. As part of this process we published a security advisory related to a DoS vulnerability that was fully addressed in v0.102.1. The security audit also motivated us to think about ways to harden official Collector builds and have a more secure default configuration. We are working on adopting several best practices that were recommended in the audit to ach...| OpenTelemetry
Following significant collaboration between Elastic and OpenTelemetry’s profiling community, which included a thorough review process, we’re excited to announce that the OpenTelemetry project has accepted Elastic’s donation of its continuous profiling agent. This marks a significant milestone in establishing profiling as a core telemetry signal in OpenTelemetry. Elastic’s eBPF based profiling agent observes code across different programming languages and runtimes, third-party librarie...| OpenTelemetry
In the dynamic world of cloud-native and distributed applications, managing microservices effectively is critical. Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestration, enabling seamless deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. The distributed nature of such systems, however, adds a layer of complexity in the form of networking for in-cluster communication. Two well-known projects, Envoy and Istio, have emerged as the foundation for the smooth mana...| OpenTelemetry
On our path toward graduation, the OpenTelemetry project is currently undergoing a security audit sponsored by the CNCF, facilitated by OSTIF, and performed by 7ASecurity. During this process, we have received a few ideas about things that we could do better, like using specific compiler flags when preparing our OpenTelemetry Collector binaries. On 31 May 2024, we received a more serious report: a malicious user could cause a denial of service (DoS) when using a specially crafted HTTP or gRPC...| OpenTelemetry
Large Language Models (LLMs) are really popular right now, especially considering the wide range of applications that they have from simple chatbots to Copilot bots that are helping software engineers write code. Seeing the growing use of LLMs in production, it’s important for users to learn how to understand and monitor how these models behave. In the following example, we’ll use Prometheus and Jaeger as the target backend for metrics and traces generated by an auto-instrumentation LLM m...| OpenTelemetry
The Go SIG will remove the code of contrib modules that lack code owners starting August 21, 2024. Published packages and releases will be marked as deprecated, though they’ll remain available for download. Currently unowned modules include the following: go.opentelemetry.io/contrib/detectors/aws/ec2 go.opentelemetry.io/contrib/detectors/aws/ecs go.opentelemetry.io/contrib/detectors/aws/eks go.opentelemetry.io/contrib/detectors/aws/lambda go.opentelemetry.io/contrib/instrumentation/github.c...| OpenTelemetry
Filelog receiver is one of the most commonly used components of the OpenTelemetry Collector, as indicated by the most recent survey. According to the same survey, it’s unsurprising that Kubernetes is the leading platform for Collector deployment (80.6%). Based on these two facts, we can realize the importance of seamless log collection on Kubernetes environments. Currently, the filelog receiver is capable of parsing container logs from Kubernetes Pods, but it requires extensive configuratio...| OpenTelemetry
The OpenTelemetry (OTel) Operator is a Kubernetes Operator that manages OTel for you in your Kubernetes cluster to make life a little easier. It does the following: Manages deployment of the OpenTelemetry Collector, supported by the OpenTelemetryCollector custom resource (CR). Manages the configuration of a fleet of OpenTelemetry Collectors via OpAMP integration, supported by the OpAMPBridge custom resource. Provides integration with the Prometheus Operator’s PodMonitor and ServiceMonitor C...| OpenTelemetry
The OpenTelemetry (OTel) Collector has become a cornerstone tool for observing and monitoring modern software applications. Recently, the End User SIG conducted a survey to gather feedback from users about their experiences with the OTel Collector. While we acknowledge that the 186 responses we received may not be statistically significant, they represent a great start and provide valuable insights. These insights include details about users’ deployment practices and implementation challeng...| OpenTelemetry
In 2023, OpenTelemetry announced that it achieved stability for logs, metrics, and traces. While this was our initial goal at the formation of the project, fulfilling our vision of enabling built-in observability for cloud native applications requires us to continue evolving with the community. This year, we’re proud to announce that exactly two years after the Profiling SIG was created at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, we’re taking a big step towards this goal by mergi...| OpenTelemetry
otelsql is an instrumentation library for the database/sql library of the Go programming language. It generates traces and metrics from the application when interacting with databases. By doing that, the library allows you to identify errors or slowdowns in your SQL queries that potentially impact the performance of your application. Let’s go dive into how to use this library! Getting Started otelsql is a wrapper layer for interfaces from database/sql. When users use the wrapped database in...| OpenTelemetry
The OpenTelemetry Collector is one of my favorite OpenTelemetry (OTel) components. It’s a flexible and powerful data pipeline which allows you to ingest OTel data from one or more sources, transform it (including batching, filtering, and masking), and export it to one or more observability backends for analysis. It’s vendor-neutral. It’s extensible, meaning that you can create your own custom components for it. What’s there not to like?| OpenTelemetry
At Skyscanner, as in many organizations, teams tend to follow specific runbooks for individual failure modes. With modern and complex distributed systems, this has the downside of most of the errors being unknowns, which makes runbooks only partially applicable. After migrating our telemetry data to the OpenTelemetry standards at Skyscanner, we now have richer instrumentation and can rely on observability directly. As a result, we are ready to adopt a new observability mindset, which requires...| OpenTelemetry
The OpenTelemetry maintainers are excited to have Sakshi Patle join our project as an intern via the Outreachy program. In this blog post, you can learn why Sakshi chose to apply for the Outreachy program and to contribute towards OpenTelemetry. If you also want to get the opportunity to participate in open source and open science, check the Outreachy website for important dates Hello world! I’m Sakshi Patle, a final-year Computer Science and Engineering student at Rajiv Gandhi Proudyogiki ...| OpenTelemetry