The observability landscape is changing. Today’s digital transformation journey has highlighted the need for observability as organizations look to capture, analyze and correlate all data across every level of the application stack including logs, metrics, traces and events. With the rampant rise of data, collecting these signals is imperative to both business insights and system optimization.
Over the last several years, open source data collection has given software and engineering teams the freedom to decide which technologies they want to standardize on for data collection and which vendors they would like data sent to. While open source data collection brought a lot of freedom and advantages, it also created some new problems. The lack of a single, comprehensive framework for all the critical signals observability tracked created a lot of friction for developers. As we move into the new year, businesses are taking the opportunity to reflect on how they can better use their data and apply intelligence to help customers make decisions and sift through all the noise. Enter OpenTelemetry.
What is OpenTelemetry?
OpenTelemetry is a collection of tools, APIs and SDKs that instrument, generate, collect and export all machine data; it was born from the need to develop an industry-wide standard for software instrumentation. By leveraging a single cloud-native framework to complete observability, OpenTelemetry is becoming the gold standard for collecting machine data.
OpenTelemetry consists of three primary components: Specification, collector and instrumentation. The specification uses an API, SDK and the semantic conventions and protocol of OpenTelemetry to determine the cross-language requirements for all implementations. The collector removes the need for multiple data collection agents. It is a vendor-neutral method for receiving, processing, transforming and exporting data. The instrumentation libraries allow users to integrate their applications with OpenTelemetry using auto-instrumentation and support from multiple frameworks and languages. Together they provide a robust framework for companies to disrupt their existing observability practices and amplify them even further.
It’s All About the Customers
Most modern enterprises have complex distributed microservices consisting of tens, hundreds or thousands of components that are all working together to deliver on customer experience. If organizations can’t correlate between those components or the different signals easily, it will slow down a business’s ability to effectively monitor, diagnose and troubleshoot issues.
For years, organizations have leaned into observability by relying on multiple infrastructure vendors to gather, enrich and ship data to vendors. Still, many still do not maximize observability’s most pronounced ability: Correlating complex systems and signals.
As end users desire deep insight into their data, they also expect vendors to offer the best experience to identify and resolve issues within their systems with the help of observability. With true observability, organizations can give customers back their time to focus on what matters, which is managing the digital experiences for their customers and empowering them to meet their customers’ needs.
A Similar Road to Adoption
Much like Kubernetes has been essential for the growing adoption of software containers, the industry is already witnessing the same adoption approach around OpenTelemetry for observability. Kubernetes won the war for becoming the standard for container orchestration. Now, OpenTelemetry will bring the same standards needed for observability with comprehensive visibility into the health and performance of every layer of the stack.
OpenTelemetry has become widely adopted by the software development community, but it’s still at the beginning of its journey. The developer community made Kubernetes a success, and we will see the same with OpenTelemetry as customers demand better integration and less lock-in. For vendors involved around applications and software—from more traditional approaches like application performance management to software development pipelines and management tools and through to cloud-native services—supporting OpenTelemetry will be table stakes in the future.
With extensive portability, greater developer control and strong vendor and cloud provider support, OpenTelemetry has opened a new world to customers by helping to improve achievable results across the application infrastructure, from the software development process to areas like security.
How can businesses continue to move the needle on observability while balancing growing customer demands? Quite simply: If organizations aren’t thinking about OpenTelemetry now, they are losing competitive advantage by lacking the proper visibility to deliver on the service level objectives that customers expect in this day and age.
