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OpenTelemetry splashes first wave of Betas for Java, Go, JavaScript, Python, and .Net 

Adrian Bridgwater
Adrian Bridgwater

OpenTelemetry is an open source project created to provide a toolkit for cloud-native software observability… and, if anything, this is the age of software observability.

The project has now reached the beta release phase for the first wave of supported languages – including Java, JavaScript, Python, Go and .Net – as well as the OpenTelemetry Collector.

By integrating tracing and metrics into a single system, OpenTelemetry provides a framework for building observability platforms.

OpenTelemetry simplifies the instrumentation of cloud-native software — and it has so-called ‘rich correlations’ between tracing and metrics that help developers conduct root cause analysis in distributed systems.

To address the challenges around performance and root cause analysis introduced by emerging technologies like microservices, OpenTelemtry teamed up with experts in telemetry to standardise observability – this (hopefully) making it much more accessible for development teams working in complex environments.

“We’ve made significant progress on OpenTelemetry in the last few weeks as we’ve successfully added more languages for inclusion in the beta launch. We’ll continue to add more language-specific components to the project as we move forward, bringing us closer to our mission of instrumenting the world,” said Morgan McLean, co-founder of OpenCensus and OpenTelemetry and product manager at Google.

By qualifying for the beta launch, each component meets the requirements including the implementation of all features contained in the OpenTelemetry Specification, v0.3 or higher. This includes implementation of all API features, including traces, metrics, context propagation, and semantic conventions.

“At LightStep, we conducted research that found that 91 percent of developers are using or plan to use microservices, and almost all developers reported challenges in using microservices,” said Ben Sigelman, a member of the governance committee of OpenTelemetry and CEO of LightStep. 

A CNCF Sandbox member, OpenTelemetry is an open source project that aims to make observability more accessible for all. Formed through the merger of Google’s OpenCensus and the CNCF’s OpenTracing, the project is currently comprised of 82 companies, including LightStep, Google, Microsoft, Splunk, Postmates and Uber.