OTel Me All About OpenTelemetry The Current & Future State, Navigating the Project, and Getting Involved

1. OTel Me All About
OpenTelemetry
The Current & Future State,
Navigating the Project, and
Getting Involved
Reese Lee, New Relic

2. AGENDA
● Introductions
● Current & Future State
● Navigating the Project
● Getting Involved
● Q&A

3. INTRODUCTIONS
Reese Lee
Developer Relations Engineer
OpenTelemetry Community
Team, New Relic
Is also into: the paranormal, stand-up comedy, and all the
foods

4. INTRODUCTIONS
What is purpose of this webinar?
● To help end users navigate the community and project
● To encourage contributions

5. INTRODUCTIONS
What is the OpenTelemetry project?
● A collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs
● To help you analyze your software’s
performance and behavior
● Merging of OpenTracing and
OpenCensus in 2019

6. INTRODUCTIONS
What is OpenTelemetry not?
● OpenTelemetry != backend or
storage solution

7. CURRENT & FUTURE STATE
● What’s the current state of the project?
● What’s new and upcoming?

8. CURRENT & FUTURE STATE
What’s the current state of the project?

9. CURRENT & FUTURE STATE
What’s the current state of the project?
opentelemetry.io/status

10. CURRENT & FUTURE STATE
What’s the current state of the project?
Data Model GA (2020) GA (2021) GA (2022)
API Spec GA (2021) GA (2022) In progress
SDK Spec GA (2021) GA (2022) In progress
Protocol GA (2021) GA (2022) GA (2022)
Implementations 8 GA, 4 in progress 0 GA, 5 RC, 7 in
progress
0 GA, 0 RC,
Collector usable in
prod
Traces Metrics Logs

11. CURRENT & FUTURE STATE
What’s new and upcoming?
● Metrics RC and GA releases
● Profiles being added as a
new signal
● Logging GA targeted for 2023
● Instrumentation availability and quality
● Community demo application SIG
● End user discussion group

12. NAVIGATING THE PROJECT
● Concepts & Components
● Community
○ SIGs
○ Governance Committee
○ Technical Committee
● Documentation
● Bonus: OTEPs

13. NAVIGATING THE PROJECT
What are some of the various OpenTelemetry concepts and components?
● API
● SDK
● Semantic conventions
● Specification
● Collector
● OTLP

14. NAVIGATING THE PROJECT
What are some of the various OpenTelemetry concepts and components?
● API
● SDK
● Semantic conventions
● Specification
● Collector
● OTLP
Provides a standard way to collect
instrumentation data

15. NAVIGATING THE PROJECT
What are some of the various OpenTelemetry concepts and components?
● API
● SDK
● Semantic conventions
● Specification
● Collector
● OTLP
Provides standard ways to configure what
we want to do with the instrumentation
data collected by the API

16. NAVIGATING THE PROJECT
What are some of the various OpenTelemetry concepts and components?
● API
● SDK
● Semantic conventions
● Specification
● Collector
● OTLP
Conventional attributes that
describe common software
operations

17. NAVIGATING THE PROJECT
What are some of the various OpenTelemetry concepts and components?
● API
● SDK
● Semantic conventions
● Specification
● Collector
● OTLP
Provides blueprints for all of the
above to bring standardization
across all languages

18. NAVIGATING THE PROJECT
What are some of the various OpenTelemetry concepts and components?
● API
● SDK
● Semantic conventions
● Specification
● Collector
● OTLP
A highly configurable system for
processing telemetry data

19. NAVIGATING THE PROJECT
What are some of the various OpenTelemetry concepts and components?
● API
● SDK
● Semantic conventions
● Specification
● Collector
● OTLP How each data signal should be
encoded and transferred over
OpenTelemetry’s exchange protocol

20. NAVIGATING THE PROJECT
What are the SIGs?
● Special Interest Groups
● Improve workflow, manage project efficiently
● Each SIG meets regularly, meeting notes and recordings are
available (check public calendar)
● Examples: Communications, Ruby, Collector

21. NAVIGATING THE PROJECT
What is the Governance Committee?
● Role: “to be a live, responsive body that can refactor and reform
as necessary to adapt to a changing project and community”
What is the Technical Committee?
● Role: “responsible for all technical development within the
OpenTelemetry project”

22. NAVIGATING THE PROJECT
What about documentation?
● opentelemetry.io/docs
● Communications SIG
● Some languages have more
comprehensive documentation than
others
● Standardization and improvements
under way

23. NAVIGATING THE PROJECT
Bonus: What are OTEPs?
● OpenTelemetry Enhancement
Proposal
● OTEP process for proposing changes to
the specification
● Cross-cutting changes that “introduce
new behaviour, change desired
behaviour, or otherwise modify
requirements”

24. GETTING INVOLVED
● How do I get help with using OpenTelemetry?
● What areas need help, and why should/how can I contribute?

25. GETTING INVOLVED
How do I get help with using OpenTelemetry?
● Slack
○ Vendor-specific or #otel-vendor
○ General
● Github
● End user discussion (incoming)

26. GETTING INVOLVED
What areas need help, and why should/how can I contribute?

27. GETTING INVOLVED
What areas need help, and why should/how can I contribute?
● Honestly, everything
● But particularly:
○ Documentation
○ PHP
○ Instrumentation (defining semantic conventions and
maintaining contributed instrumentation)

28. GETTING INVOLVED
What areas need help, and why should/how can I contribute?

29. GETTING INVOLVED
What areas need help, and why should/how can I contribute?
Implementers have one view of the universe, end
users have another. We need more end users to speak
up and have a voice in the project!
Ted Young, co-founder of OpenTelemetry and
Director of Developer Education, Lightstep

30. GETTING INVOLVED
What areas need help, and why should/how can I contribute?
Juraci Paixão Kröhling, OpenTelemetry maintainer and
Software Engineer, Grafana

31. GETTING INVOLVED
What areas need help, and why should/how can I contribute?
…the biggest advantage is that companies can help shape the
project's direction according to their needs, and I don't mean it in a
bad way at all: a lot of times, the project maintainers make
decisions based on what they think users would want. Sometimes,
we have data or requests from actual customers, but it's not the
same thing: having the opinions of a diverse user base is essential
for the project's success.
Juraci Paixão Kröhling, OpenTelemetry maintainer and
Software Engineer, Grafana

32. GETTING INVOLVED
What areas need help, and why should/how can I contribute?
But one thing I see companies doing wrong is just telling their folks
to contribute, without a strategy in mind. So, my advice is to focus
on the areas that matter to the company, with a plan and strategic
direction. If they can get measurable goals attached to the
company's own goal, so much the better: this way, their open
source contributions become relevant to the company!
Juraci Paixão Kröhling, OpenTelemetry maintainer and
Software Engineer, Grafana

33. GETTING INVOLVED
What areas need help, and why should/how can I contribute?
I love working in open source because its
global nature exposes me to a very diverse set
of people, ideas, and opinions that would
otherwise be difficult to tap into.
Daniel Dyla, OpenTelemetry maintainer & Governance
Committee Member, and Senior Open Source Architect,
Dynatrace

34. GETTING INVOLVED
What areas need help, and why should/how can I contribute?
I also especially love the community feeling in
OpenTelemetry where vendors and platforms
who would ordinarily be considered competitors
can work together to improve the state of the
ecosystem for everybody involved.
Daniel Dyla, OpenTelemetry maintainer & Governance
Committee Member, and Senior Open Source Architect,
Dynatrace

35. GETTING INVOLVED
What areas need help, and why should/how can I contribute?
…participating and contributing to OSS helps
you hone your skills. If you have not worked for
a remote-first company before, joining an OSS
project will help you gain real world experience.
Ariel Valentin, OpenTelemetry contributor & adopter, and
Software Engineer Observability, GitHub

36. GETTING INVOLVED
What areas need help, and why should/how can I contribute?
● What are you interested in?
● Code and non-code contributions welcome
● Join:
○ Mailing lists
○ The appropriate SIG
○ Community meetings

37. GETTING INVOLVED
What areas need help, and why should/how can I contribute?
● Share your experiences and feedback about using
OpenTelemetry with us!

38. Q&A
What else would you
like to know?

39. RESOURCES
OpenTelemetry links
● Official site
● Community Github
● Google calendar
● CNCF Slack
Get or keep in touch with me!
● LinkedIn (reese-lee)
● @reesesbytes (Twitter)