My personal view
OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework that was created to address the challenges of monitoring modern, cloud-native applications. In this blog post, we’ll explore why OpenTelemetry came into existence and its projected future in detail.
The Need for a New Observability Framework
With the rise of microservices, containers, and serverless architectures, traditional monitoring approaches have become inadequate. These modern, cloud-native applications are composed of multiple services running on different platforms and infrastructures, making it difficult to trace and troubleshoot issues. In addition, these applications generate a large volume of telemetry data, including traces, metrics, and logs, which need to be collected, processed, and analyzed in real-time.
To address these challenges, two observability projects, OpenCensus and OpenTracing, were created. OpenCensus provided a way of collecting and exporting telemetry data, while OpenTracing provided a way of tracing requests across multiple services. However, these two projects had different goals and approaches, leading to fragmentation in the observability landscape.
The Birth of OpenTelemetry
To provide a unified and more comprehensive observability solution, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) initiated the OpenTelemetry project in 2019. OpenTelemetry merged the best features of OpenCensus and OpenTracing and added new features to provide a standardized way of collecting, processing, and exporting telemetry data.
OpenTelemetry provides a vendor-agnostic way of instrumenting applications and services to generate telemetry data. It supports various telemetry data types, including traces, metrics, and logs, and provides APIs and SDKs for instrumenting applications and services in multiple languages. It also includes exporters that can export telemetry data to various backends, including cloud monitoring platforms like Prometheus, Jaeger, and Zipkin.
The Future of OpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry has gained significant traction in the observability community since its launch. It has a growing list of contributors, including various organizations, vendors, and developers. Its vendor-agnostic approach has attracted many users who prefer an open-source solution that is not tied to a specific cloud provider.
The future of OpenTelemetry looks promising. The project is continuously adding new features and improving its existing features. For example, the project recently added support for distributed tracing and log correlation across multiple services. It has also added support for new export destinations and improved its performance and scalability.
In addition, OpenTelemetry is becoming the de-facto observability standard for cloud-native applications. Various cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), have announced their support for OpenTelemetry. This support means that users can use OpenTelemetry to collect telemetry data from their cloud services and export it to their preferred observability platform.
Conclusion
OpenTelemetry came into existence to provide a unified and more comprehensive observability solution for modern, cloud-native applications. Its vendor-agnostic approach and support for multiple telemetry data types and export destinations make it an attractive choice for many users. With its growing community and support from various cloud providers, OpenTelemetry is poised to become the de-facto observability standard for cloud-native applications.