OpenTelemetry Monthly Update: April 2020

Much progress is being made on OpenTelemetry, now that several components have gone beta! This month’s update focuses on the GA planning process, feedback from user studies, and the new logging SIG.

Each community update covers topics discussed at the monthly community meetings, which take place on Wednesdays and can be found on our community calendar.

Maintainers Sync + GA Planning

We’re kicking off a weekly sync for SIG maintainers to meet and discuss the status of each OpenTelemetry workstream, ask questions about implementing any recent spec changes, and plan upcoming releases. These meetings take place on Mondays at 9:00 AM PT and can be found on the community calendar. Thanks go to Ted for organizing this!

In addition to the topics discussed above, we’ll be using the maintainers meeting to plan and track our execution towards general availability. GA planning is still in the brainstorming phase, and we’re using the existing launch plan to maintain the draft list of GA requirements.

User Studies

Lightstep has run a series of user studies since the OpenTelemetry beta announcement. They have a number of useful findings that range from topics like integration installation, SDK configuration, propagators, etc. The full discussion is detailed in the monthly community meeting notes, and I recommend that everyone check them out.

Ted can provide additional information for anyone interested.

Logging Update

The OpenTelemetry logging SIG has become quite popular and we’ve made significant progress over the past few weeks. We’ve split logging-related conversations into two homes:

• The Logging SIG, which is focused on a logging data model, a logging spec, and first-class logging support in the OpenTelemetry APIs and SDKs.
• The Collector SIG, which is prototyping ways of capturing logs from traditional sources by interfacing with agents like FluentBit

Are you using OpenTelemetry?

Now that components are in or are entering beta, OpenTelemetry is starting to be integrated into live services. If you or your organization uses OpenTelemetry, please let us know by adding a reference to our brand new adopters list (which is so new that it only has entry, please add more!). This list provides maintainers with a better understanding of who their users are, gives the project credibility, and is a prerequisite for CNCF maturity levels that we want to achieve in the future.

CNCF Observability SIG

The CNCF observability SIG held its first meeting this week. The SIG serves as a place of dialog between different observability-related CNCF projects, and a number of OpenTelemetry members are involved. If this is of interest to you, please join!