Blog on OffeneFermessung

OpenTelemetry Protocol with Apache Arrow - Phase 2 Announcement

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 20:24:25 +0200

We are excited to announce the next phase of the OpenTelemetry Protocol with Apache Arrow project (OTel-Arrow). We began this project several years ago with the goal of bridging between OpenTelemetry data and the Apache Arrow ecosystem. Apache Arrow is a framework designed for zero-copy exchange of structured data between column-oriented data producers and consumers.

We believe that having OpenTelemetry data accessible to external systems through Apache Arrow will lead to powerful integrations, with the potential for new telemetry systems and applications to emerge. For large streams of telemetry, we know that column-oriented data handling is substantially more efficient, with improved data compression and performance.

Join us for OpenTelemetry Talks and Activities at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon China 2025

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 20:24:25 +0200

The OpenTelemetry project invites you to join members of the OpenTelemetry community at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Asia:

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon China (registration) in Hong Kong from June 10 to 11, 2025.
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Japan the following week.

This post covers all currently scheduled activities related to OpenTelemetry that are happening during KubeCon. Check back for updates before the start of the conference!

KubeCon talks and maintainer sessions

Antipatterns in Observability: Lessons Learned and How OpenTelemetry Solves Them
by Steve Flanders, Splunk
Tuesday, June 10 • 13:45 - 14:15
Advancing Observability With Compile-Time Auto-Instrumentation in Golang
by Liu Ziming, Alibaba Cloud & Przemek Delewski, Quesma
Tuesday, June 10 • 14:30 - 15:00
OpenTelemetry Project Update
by Zihao Rao, Alibaba Cloud; Hui Wang, VictoriaMetrics; Jared Tan, DaoCloud
Tuesday, June 10 • 16:15 -16:45
Unified Observability in gRPC: Metrics and Tracing Using OpenTelemetry Plugin
by Purnesh Dixit, Google
Wednesday, June 11 • 11:00 - 11:30

Join us

Come listen, learn, and get involved in OpenTelemetry. See you in Hong!

Join us for OpenTelemetry Talks and Activities at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Japan 2025

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 20:24:25 +0200

The OpenTelemetry project invites you to join members of the OpenTelemetry community at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Japan (registration) and at the co-located Community Day in Tokyo spanning from June 14 to 17, 2025.

This post covers all currently scheduled activities related to OpenTelemetry that are happening during KubeCon. Check back for updates before the start of the conference!

Community Day

Taking place on June 15, this free event offers a chance to engage with the cloud native community before the main conference begins.

Kubernetes CPU Metrics in the kubeletstats Receiver: Transition from .cpu.utilization to .cpu.usage

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 20:24:25 +0200

The OpenTelemetry Collector’s kubeletstats receiver is a crucial component for collecting Kubernetes node, pod and container metrics. To improve metric accuracy and adhere to OpenTelemetry semantic conventions, we are updating how CPU metrics are named and emitted.

This blog post explains the motivation behind this change, the impact on users, the role of the feature gate which was introduced for this change, and guidance on migrating.

Why This Change?

Historically, the kubeletstats receiver emitted CPU metrics labeled with .cpu.utilization, such as:

Announcing the RPC Semantic Conventions stabilization project

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 20:24:25 +0200

The Semantic Conventions SIG is excited to kick off the RPC stabilization effort!

Following the stabilization of the database conventions in May 2025, we’re continuing our work to stabilize key areas—and RPC is next.

It takes a village to define a solid convention, especially for a space as diverse as RPC technologies, which include gRPC, JSON-RPC, Apache Dubbo, and many others. If you work on one of these frameworks, use them extensively, or are simply interested in learning more, come join us—we’d love your help!

Exposing OTel Collector in Kubernetes with Gateway API & mTLS

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 20:24:25 +0200

The goal of this blog post is to demonstrate how you can expose an OpenTelemetry (OTel) Collector running inside Kubernetes to the outside world securely, using the Kubernetes Gateway API and mutual TLS (mTLS) for authentication and encryption.

As observability becomes increasingly critical in modern distributed systems, centralizing telemetry data via OTel Collectors deployed in one or many Kubernetes clusters is common practice. Often, services or agents running outside your Kubernetes cluster need to send data to these Collectors. Exposing internal services requires careful consideration of security and standardization. This is where the Kubernetes Gateway API and mTLS shine.

Insights from the OpenTelemetry Contributor Experience Survey

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 20:24:25 +0200

The OpenTelemetry Contributor Experience SIG recently surveyed the community to learn what it’s like to contribute to the project and what we can do to improve the contributor experience. The Contributor Experience Survey asked contributors for their thoughts about the project’s organization, SIG contributions, leadership committee interactions, and event attendance. We received 120 responses and heard from all 47 Special Interest Groups (SIGs). We’ll use this feedback to make contributing to OpenTelemetry easier and more rewarding. A big thank you to everyone who participated in the survey! Let’s review the results.

OTel Community Day + Open Observability Summit: One Big Day for Open Source Observability

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 20:24:25 +0200

On June 26, 2025, OTel Community Day and Open Observability Summit are joining forces at Open Source Summit North America. The OpenTelemetry governance and technical committees, along with project maintainers, are excited to present two community-led tracks, one co-located event, and a shared goal: bring the observability community together to collaborate, learn, and shape the future of open source observability.

Open Observability Summit is for developers, operators, and technical leaders who rely on open source to gain deeper insight into their systems. Every session is grounded in real-world experience and shaped by the community. Expect hands-on learning, practical talks, and open dialogue.

OpenTelemetry Celebrates Pride

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 20:24:25 +0200

OpenTelemetry, like all open source projects, only exists thanks to the tireless work of thousands of contributors and maintainers. To celebrate and recognize Pride Month in the United States, we’ve created several variants of our iconic telescope logo for contributors to use.

Happy Pride!

You can download the files here.

Action Required - Slack Workspace Changes are Coming Friday, June 20

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 20:24:25 +0200

Yesterday the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced that CNCF Slack workspace will be converted from an enterprise plan to a free plan on Friday, June 20, 2025. This will have implications for how Slack works for the OpenTelemetry community, including a few limitations that we will need to be aware of; however, we don’t anticipate this change to radically impact our collaboration.

Although there will be no disruption to OpenTelemetry’s access to the Slack workspace, all users and project contributors should consider taking the following actions:

Adding Automatic Instrumentation to Your App, Made Easy with the OpenTelemetry Injector

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 20:24:25 +0200

As OpenTelemetry adoption grows across infrastructure and application layers, easing the operational burden of instrumentation remains a shared priority. Today, we’re excited to highlight a recent donation from Splunk to the OpenTelemetry community: a host-based mechanism to automatically inject OpenTelemetry Automatic Instrumentation into your app on any Linux host.

This component has reached production stability and is now being donated to the community as the OpenTelemetry Injector. It helps streamline OpenTelemetry deployment across languages and systems.

Observability by Design: Unlocking Consistency with OpenTelemetry Weaver

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 20:24:25 +0200

TL;DR

OpenTelemetry Weaver helps teams build observability by design, enabling consistent, type-safe, and automated telemetry through semantic conventions. With Weaver, you can define, validate, and evolve your telemetry schemas, ensuring reliability and clarity across your systems.

Why consistency matters: Enter semantic conventions

Have you ever experienced…

A deployment that breaks existing alerts or dashboards because a metric name changed?
Writing overly complex queries because teams use different metric names for the same thing?
Losing hours debugging production issues due to missing or unclear instrumentation?
Teams struggling to interpret undocumented or inconsistent metrics?

If any of this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. These are the symptoms of treating telemetry as an afterthought, instead of an intentional part of your software design. That’s where semantic conventions come in.

How Should Prometheus Handle OpenTelemetry Resource Attributes? - A UX Research Report

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 20:24:25 +0200

On May 29th, 2025, I wrapped up my mentorship with Prometheus through the Linux Foundation Mentorship Program. My project focused on understanding how Prometheus handles OpenTelemetry resource attributes and how that experience could be improved for users. My job was to conduct user research to get the user perspective on this challenge. In three months, I conducted user and stakeholder interviews, ran a survey, and analyzed the findings.

In this article, I’ll share how I conducted the research, what I uncovered and where the communities involved could go from here.

OTel in Practice: Alibaba's OpenTelemetry Journey

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 20:24:25 +0200

In the latest session of OTel in Practice, engineers Huxing Zhang and Steve Rao shared Alibaba’s journey adopting OpenTelemetry within their services.

The discussion focused on a wide range of topics, from Java agents to Go compile-time instrumentation, and of course Gen-AI observability!

Focusing on Java, Alibaba initially used an in-house solution based on Pinpoint, but faced limitations with framework support and asynchronous context propagation. It was then that they decided to migrate to OpenTelemetry to leverage its strong ecosystem and status as an industry standard.

How to Name Your Spans

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 20:24:25 +0200

One of the most fundamental yet often overlooked aspects of good instrumentation is naming. This post is the first in a series dedicated to the art and science of naming things in OpenTelemetry. We’ll start with spans, the building blocks of a distributed trace, and give you the most important takeaway right at the beginning: how to name the spans that describe your unique business logic.

Naming your business spans

While OpenTelemetry’s automatic instrumentation is fantastic for covering standard operations (like incoming HTTP requests or database calls), the most valuable insights often come from the custom spans you add to your own business logic. These are the operations unique to your application’s domain.

More Signal, Less Noise: How GitHub Issue Reactions Help Prioritize

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 20:24:25 +0200

Did you know that OpenTelemetry has had more than 23,000 contributors—that’s individuals who shared issues, commits, pull requests, or comments on GitHub—since the project started? We always encourage everyone to get involved, whether that’s by joining one of our (many!) CNCF Slack channels, or dropping into any public meeting to listen in and share different perspectives. This openness is one of our greatest strengths, but it also means we get a firehose of feedback via many different routes: GitHub, Slack, StackOverflow, meetings, and even posts on social media.

How to Name Your Span Attributes

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 20:24:25 +0200

Welcome to the second installment in our series on OpenTelemetry naming best practices. In our previous post, we explored how to name spans using the {verb} {object} pattern. Today, we’re diving into span attributes—the rich contextual data that transforms your traces from simple operation logs into powerful debugging and analysis tools.

This guide targets developers who are:

Instrumenting their own applications with custom spans and attributes
Enriching telemetry beyond what auto-instrumentation provides
Creating libraries that others will instrument

The attribute naming decisions you make directly impact the usability and maintainability of your observability data. Let’s get them right.

Your Critical Legacy App is a Black Box? Let's Change That in 5 Minutes!

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 20:24:25 +0200

In almost every established enterprise, there’s THAT one system. It’s the one running in the corner, performing a critical function for years. It’s reliable, but it’s also a complete black box. No one wants to touch it for fear of breaking it, and the original developers are long gone. It could be a core banking ledger from the 90s, a logistics routing engine in a warehouse, or a data aggregator on a factory floor. You know it works because, well, it hasn’t failed… yet.

How to Name Your Metrics

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 20:24:25 +0200

Metrics are the quantitative backbone of observability—the numbers that tell us how our systems are performing. This is the third post in our OpenTelemetry naming series, where we’ve already explored how to name spans and how to enrich them with meaningful attributes. Now let’s tackle the art of naming the measurements that matter.

Unlike spans that tell stories about what happened, metrics tell us about quantities: how many, how fast, how much. But here’s the thing—naming them well is just as crucial as naming spans, and the principles we’ve learned apply here too. The “who” still belongs in attributes, not names.

How to Contribute to OpenTelemetry

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 20:24:25 +0200

You might have heard about OpenTelemetry, found it interesting and want to get involved, but the path to contribution isn’t immediately clear. You might start messaging people asking to get assigned to issues, or just give a shout out saying “I’m here to help, just let me know”, but you never hear back. So how can you actually start contributing to OpenTelemetry?

Open source thrives on community, mutual support, and the collaborative development of innovative technology. It also comes with challenges, especially if you’re new to this ecosystem.