OpenTelemetry is a set of tools, APIs, and SDKs designed for instrumenting, collecting, and exporting telemetry data (metrics, logs, traces) to enhance software performance analysis. The project is highly active within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and is widely adopted across major cloud vendors and service providers. It features a single library per language for instrumentation and supports various data formats and processing techniques to standardize and streamline observability.

1. OpenTelemetry 101 FTW
Steve Flanders

2. Steve Flanders
Sr. Director of Engineering,
Splunk
@smflanders
Founding Member of
OpenTelmetry
Founding Member of OpenCensus
OpenTelemetry Collector Triager
OpenTelemetry Website Maintainer
10+ years of monitoring and
observability experience
○ OpenTelemetry + Metrics @Splunk
○ OpenCensus + APM @Omnition
○ Logs @VMware

3. What is OpenTelemetry?
OpenTelemetry is a collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs.
Use it to instrument, generate, collect, and export
telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces) to help you
analyze your software’s performance and behavior.
https://opentelemetry.io/

4. 4
is the second most active
project in CNCF today!
🎉 🎉
(per CNCF DevStats)

5. Everyone is Contributing and Adopting
https://github.com/open-telemetry/community/blob/master/ADOPTERS.md
https://medium.com/jaegertracing/jaeger-embraces-opentelemetry-collector-90a545cbc24
AWS | Azure | GCP Every major vendor!
Mailchimp (PHP)
Postmates (Erlang)
Shopify (Ruby)
Cloud Providers Vendors End-users Other
Jaeger > OtelCol
Fluent-bit <3 log SIG
Envoy support
OpenMetrics support
Spring support

6. COLLECTOR
Single binary to receive,
process, and export data
SPECIFICATION
API, SDK, Data
OpenTelemetry Components
INSTRUMENTATION
LIBRARIES
Single library per language

7. Specification + Data Portability
https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/blob/master/specification/trace/semantic_conventions/README.md
https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/tree/master/specification/resource/semantic_conventions

8. Semantic conventions normalize data.
HTTP: http.method, http.status_code
Database: db.instance, db.statement
Messaging: messaging.system
FaaS: faas.trigger
Application
Database
Otel Library
Specification + Data Portability
https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/blob/master/specification/trace/semantic_conventions/README.md
https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/tree/master/specification/resource/semantic_conventions

9. Semantic conventions normalize data.
HTTP: http.method, http.status_code
Database: db.instance, db.statement
Messaging: messaging.system
FaaS: faas.trigger
Resources capture environment metadata.
Application: Service, Telemetry
Compute Unit: Container, FaaS, Process
Compute Instance: Host
Environment: OS, Cloud, Deployment
Application
Database
Otel Library
Specification + Data Portability
https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/blob/master/specification/trace/semantic_conventions/README.md
https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/tree/master/specification/resource/semantic_conventions

10. Instrumentation Libraries
● Single instrumentation library per language
● All support manual instrumentation; some automatic
● Priority 1) traces 2) metrics 3) logs 4) profiling
Application
RUM
Serverless

11. ● Receivers: how you get data in
(can be push or pull-based)
● Processors: what you to do the data
(e.g. batching, metadata, etc.)
● Exporters: how you get data out
(can be push or pull-based)
● Extensions: things you do in the
collector typically outside processing
data (e.g. health check)
Collector (Binary, Agent, Service)

12. Reference architecture

13. Project Status
API: Stable
SDK: Stable
Protocol: Stable
API: Stable
SDK: Mixed
Protocol: Stable
API: Draft
SDK: Draft
Protocol: Stable
Traces Metrics Logs

14. 14
Resources
● https://opentelemetry.io (vendor-agnostic instrumentation and collection) [CNCF]
that supports all of the below open-source projects and more
● https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch (logs) + https://github.com/elastic/kibana (UI)
● https://opendistro.github.io/ (logs) + https://opensearch.org/ (UI)
● https://jaegertracing.io/ (distributed tracing / APM) [CNCF]
● https://prometheus.io/ (metrics and alerting) [CNCF] + https://github.com/grafana/grafana
(UI)
● https://cortexmetrics.io/ [CNCF] or https://thanos.io/ [CNCF] (enterprise Prometheus)
● https://openmetrics.io/ (metrics standard) [CNCF]

15. DEMO!
https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-demo-webstore

16. Thank You!