Logz.io Celebrates the Release of OpenTelemetry v.1.0

OpenTelemetry 1.0 (Otel) is finally here (in fact, 1.0.1). The announcement brings the industry closer to a standard for observability. OpenTelemetry v1.0.1 will focus solely on tracing for now, but work continues on integrations for metrics and logs. We are still a long way off from this vision becoming reality. 

Metrics today are in beta, and this is where the community focus is being applied. Logging is even earlier in its life lifecycle. The spec is in alpha and the code for testing this is even earlier, making it currently unusable. Nonetheless, it is a revolutionary moment, immediately impacting tracing with open source tools like Jaeger, and moving forward with the phase-out of OpenTracing. 

This provides clarity to users who are asking when they can use this new toolkit and just how mature it is. Many vendors, including Logz.io, have pushed users towards OpenTelemetry for tracing purposes, and now we can officially switch over to this as the primary way to ingest data into Logz.io.

Key OpenTelemetry Features 

In order to avoid painful upgrade processes like what many users have been going through with regards to OpenTracing being slowly deprecated OpenTelemetry is attempting to fix this challenge as people instrument code. 

The project’s three core tenets are long-term support, dependency isolation, and backwards compatibility. To that end, plugin interfaces and constructors will get 1-year support guarantees; the API a 3-year support guarantee. While this is not as long as one might think, it’s a starting point for a young project. 

OpenTelemetry’s API and SDK are available for a subset of languages now. The initial release covers four languages Python, Java, .NET, and Erlang. The API covers traces, spans, events, and attributes. There are still more areas missing, which will be added over time. 

The announcement also clarifies a number of important points.

Work on metrics continues, as does active discussion and coding that anyone can participate in. The work to consolidate or incorporate other metrics systems like Prometheus and OpenMetrics is ongoing., Logz.io is taking an active role in helping develop this important milestone in Open Source software.

Interestingly, the OpenTelemetry collector started off as a fork of the Jaeger collector codebase. The work being undertaken in Jaeger is incorporating and building out the OpenTelemetry collector to replace the Jaeger Collector. 

This will underpin Jaeger v2, an exciting re-architecture around OpenTelemetry. 

An Exciting New Telemetry for Open Source

Without a doubt, we are eager to tread this new track for tracing. 

As I write this, Logz.io and our engineers are contributing to both Jaeger and the OpenTelemetry project’s vision. We love supporting this amazing community and we anticipate seeing that vision come together.

Congratulations to all in the colossal, growing Open Source community around these trendsetting tracing and observability projects. We are changing observability together!