OpenTelemetry Monthly Update: September 2019

Welcome to the third monthly OpenTelemetry community update! We post these every month to recap the project’s status, important news, and discussions that took place during the monthly community meeting. If you’re new to the OpenTelemetry community, you should definitely join our community mailing list and subscribe to the shared community calendar (web, gCal, iCal). We also have a very popular official chatroom on Gitter.

Project Status

We’ve recently published a new milestone document that lays out the release schedule for the OpenTelemetry API and SDK over the next several months. Over the next several weeks, each SIG will roll out alpha releases that include features such as Tracing, Metrics, and Distributed Context propagation. We’re extremely excited to get these into your hands so that we can collect feedback as we move towards stable releases in the first quarter of 2020.

As mentioned in the last update, in-person meetings were scheduled by the specification SIG to unblock the metrics specification — these were very successful, and the metrics specification update PR is being worked. Big shout-out to everyone who participated in helping close the metrics spec!

There’s still more going on in the OTEP world, though, such as the ongoing context propagation proposal and the OpenTelemetry Protocol proposal.

Be on the lookout for another post soon with more details about alpha releases for each SIG!

Upcoming OpenTelemetry Events and Talks

As mentioned in the last community update, we’ve now got a list of OpenTelemetry-related content at KubeCon, and a few other places! If you know of something we missed, let us know and we can include it in next month’s update.

• 10/21 — Kubernetes Philly — Introduction to OpenTelemetry — Austin Parker, LightStep
• 11/14 — QCon San Francisco — Observing and Understanding Distributed Systems with OpenTelemetry — Christine Yen, Honeycomb
• 11/20 — KubeCon — Application Observability for DevSecOps — Sabree Blackmon, Docker
• 11/20 — KubeCon — Beyond Getting Started: Using OpenTelemetry to Its Full Potential — Sergey Kanzhelev, Microsoft & Morgan McLean, Google
• 11/21 — KubeCon — OpenTelemetry: The First Release, What’s Next, and How to Get Involved — Morgan McLean, Google; Tristan Sloughter, Postmates; Sergey Kanzhelev, Microsoft; Chris Kleinknecht, Google
• 11/21 — KubeCon — Deep Linking Metrics and Traces with OpenTelemetry, OpenMetrics, and M3 — Rob Skillington, Chronosphere

In addition, don’t miss the Observability Practitioners Summit on 11/18, day zero of KubeCon for a full day of talks around the field of observability. Many OpenTelemetry project members will be in attendance as well!