What is OpenTelemetry?

OpenTelemetry is a new open source project that aims to provide a vendor-neutral standard for distributed tracing. Distributed tracing is a technique used to understand the flow of requests and responses between different services in a distributed system. It is especially useful for microservice architectures, where a single user request may result in multiple service calls and responses.

OpenTelemetry is a collaboration between several major companies in the cloud-native ecosystem, including Google, Microsoft, and Uber. The goal of the project is to create a single, open standard for distributed tracing that can be used across different languages, platforms, and cloud environments. This will enable organizations to more easily collect, analyze, and visualize the flow of requests and responses in their distributed systems.

One of the key challenges in distributed systems is understanding the flow of requests and responses between different services. In a monolithic application, it is relatively easy to trace the flow of a request through the application, since all the code is in a single place. However, in a microservice architecture, a single request may result in multiple service calls, each of which may in turn make additional service calls. This can make it difficult to understand the overall flow of a request, and to identify where problems or bottlenecks may occur.

As an industry-standard it is natively supported by a number of vendors.

Distributed tracing is a technique that addresses this challenge by tracing the flow of requests and responses between different services. It does this by injecting a unique identifier, called a “trace ID”, into each request and response. As the request flows through the system, each service records the trace ID, along with information about the service and the response. This allows the tracing system to build a complete picture of the flow of the request, from the initial service call all the way to the final response.

One of the key features of OpenTelemetry is its use of the OpenTracing API. OpenTracing is an open source API for distributed tracing that has been adopted by many major companies and projects, including Kubernetes, Istio, and Jaeger. By using the OpenTracing API, OpenTelemetry allows organizations to easily integrate with existing tracing tools and frameworks, such as Jaeger, Zipkin, and Appdash.

Another key feature of OpenTelemetry is its support for multiple data exporters. This allows organizations to send tracing data to a variety of different systems and platforms, such as logs, metrics, and distributed tracing systems. This flexibility allows organizations to use the right data exporter for their specific needs, whether they want to use a managed service like Google Stackdriver, or a self-hosted solution like Elasticsearch.

In addition to the OpenTracing API and support for multiple data exporters, OpenTelemetry also includes a number of other features that make it a powerful tool for distributed tracing. For example, it includes support for multiple languages, including Java, Go, Python, and JavaScript. It also includes support for different platforms, such as Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry. And it includes a number of integrations with popular tools and services, such as Prometheus and Zipkin.

One of the benefits of using OpenTelemetry is that it provides a single, open standard for distributed tracing. This makes it easier for organizations to adopt distributed tracing, since they don’t have to worry about compatibility or vendor lock-in. It also makes it easier for organizations to share tracing data with other systems and tools, since the data is in a standardized format.

What OpenTelemetry is not

OpenTelemetry is not an observability back-end like Jaeger or Prometheus. Instead, it supports exporting data to a variety of open source and commercial back-ends. It provides a pluggable architecture so additional technology protocols and formats can be easily added.

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