This week at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe conference, the maintainers of the open source OpenTelemetry observability agent software project being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) revealed they have added profiling capabilities to enable DevOps teams to identify the root cause of issues down to a specific line of code.
Austin Parker, director of open source for Honeycomb and a maintainer of OpenTelemetry, said while several providers of IT observability platforms have in the past year added code profiling capabilities, it makes more sense to provide this as a capability surfaced by OpenTelemetry in a way that any IT platform can easily consume.
The overall goal is to reduce the amount of time it takes to troubleshoot IT issues by identifying not just the code at issue but also the development team responsible for it, noted Parker.
OpenTelemetry defines a format that makes it simpler to centrally manage the collection metrics, logs and traces using open source software. In general, OpenTelemetry continues to gain traction as DevOps teams look to rationalize the amount of commercial agent software they need to deploy, update and manage.
In effect, OpenTelemetry is aggregating agent software that, in terms of observability, provides no differentiated value, said Parker. That’s critical because as application environments become more complex, it’s all but impossible to manage them without being able to broadly apply the agent software required to instrument them.
In the future, OpenTelemetry is expected to add additional capabilities such as data pre-processing, filtering or routing to redact sensitive data in a way that still fosters observability.
Ultimately, as OpenTelemetry becomes more widely employed, it makes it significantly easier for developers to understand how their application is performing, noted Parker. Over time, armed with those insights, developers will build and deliver higher-quality applications, he added.
It’s still early days as far as adoption of OpenTelemetry is concerned, but it’s clearly well on its way to becoming a de facto standard for enabling observability. The number of developers who have access to not just metrics and logs but also traces should steadily increase as the cost of instrumenting code declines.
Of course, finding a way to collect that data inexpensively will also be crucial for applying artificial intelligence (AI) to DevOps workflows. After all, before an AI model can be trained, it needs access to verified data.
In the meantime, DevOps teams might want to consider at what rate they can replace existing commercial agents deployed across the enterprise. Much of that agent software is more mature than OpenTelemetry, but over time, the economic arguments for using open source agent software become compelling. Many of the providers of observability platforms have already made support for OpenTelemerty available by default.
Regardless of approach, the need for observability has always been apparent. The issue is that there is a world of difference between monitoring a pre-defined set of metrics and being able to launch queries to identify the root cause of an issue that metrics alone are not going to be able to surface.
