OpenTelemetry Trace 1.0 is now available

For decades, application development and operations teams have struggled with the best way to generate, collect, and analyze telemetry data from systems and apps. In 2010, we discussed our approach to telemetry and tracing in the Dapper papers, which eventually spawned the open-source OpenCensus project, which merged with OpenTracing to become OpenTelemetry. OpenTelemetry provides a single, open-source standard and a set of technologies to capture and export metrics, traces, and logs (in the future) from your applications and infrastructure. 

OpenTelemetry, which is now the second most active CNCF open-source project behind only Kubernetes, makes it easy to create and collect telemetry data from your services and software, then forward them to a variety of analysis tools. OpenTelemetry is 100% free and open source, and is adopted and supported by industry leaders in the observability space.

OpenTelemetry has reached a key milestone: the OpenTelemetry Tracing Specification has reached version 1.0. API and SDK release candidates are available for Java, Erlang, Python, Go, Node.js, and .Net. Additional languages will follow over the next few weeks. Now that Trace has reached 1.0 status, customers can deploy OpenTelemetry Trace with confidence.

Tracing stability is only the first step towards having one observability framework for trace, metrics, and logs. The top hyperscale cloud providers, application performance monitoring (APM), monitoring, logging and trace companies have partnered on OpenTelemetry to provide a unified, open-source approach that will greatly simplify the collection of telemetry data from any environment, including on-premises and multi-cloud, for all customers. One agent will work across all major hyperscale clouds, APM, logging, metrics, and trace products.

How is Google using OpenTelemetry?

At Google, respect and commitment to our users is always at the forefront of everything we do. To that end, we are fully embracing the OpenTelemetry standard to ensure that you get the best use of the information collected from any of our cloud-native products. We are working to implement OpenTelemetry libraries as out-of-the-box features in some of our most popular cloud products, for example the new Cloud SQL Insights. Insights provides database metrics and traces by honoring the propagated trace-id from the instrumented upstream application and appending spans that are representative of your query plan. These spans can be routed to your backend of choice via the Google Cloud Trace API. This makes it easy to do end-to-end tracing in your existing tools and provides a full-stack view of your environments from the application through to the database.

OpenTelemetry, Google Cloud and our partners

We believe that a healthy observability ecosystem serves our customers well and this is reflected in our continued commitment to open-source initiatives. Here are some of the partners who are fully supporting the OpenTelemetry rollout, which will enable them to build differentiated solutions for mutual customers. 

Cisco AppDynamics
“AppDynamics is committed to OpenTelemetry standards to accelerate full-stack observability. Digital has an ever growing impact on our lives, and we believe the future is to make end-to-end telemetry gathering easier in order to enable a full view of the digital environment’s health and behavior." - Abhi Madhugiri, Director, Global Strategic Alliances, Cisco AppDynamics

Datadog
“As early contributors to OpenTelemetry, we are extremely pleased to see this major milestone and to work with customers instrumenting critical, production services. Bringing together end-to-end traces, metrics, and logs is necessary to make your applications, infrastructure, and third-party services entirely observable. With this 1.0 release for Tracing, Metrics and Logs on the horizon, OpenTelemetry holds incredible promise as an open, community-driven source of instrumentation for any engineering team.” - Michael Gerstenhaber, Sr Director of Product Management, Datadog

Dynatrace
“As one of the core contributors to OpenTelemetry, Dynatrace sees great value collaborating on the open standard with other industry leaders to provide more visibility into cloud-native software stacks. Dynatrace combines OpenTelemetry and broad observability and user experience data, with automation and intelligence to help teams tame cloud-native environments, save time, and focus on activities that create customer value.” - Alois Reitbauer, VP, Chief Technology Strategist, Dynatrace

New Relic
“At New Relic, we strongly believe that the future of instrumentation is open and therefore we are glad to see the strong momentum behind OpenTelemetry. We are excited to continue contributing to the project as it marches towards GA as we are seeing rapidly growing demand for our OpenTelemetry solution among our customer base."  - Ramon Guiu, vice president of product management, New Relic.

Splunk
“Over the past two years, OpenTelemetry has grown from a proposal between two open-source communities to the north star for the collection of distributed traces and other signals. OpenTelemetry is championed by cloud platforms, has become the recommendation of many observability vendors to their customers, and now has the second highest number of contributors across all CNCF projects. Google and Splunk have been behind OpenTelemetry since day one, and the 1.0 release of tracing means that GCP and Splunk Observability Cloud customers can take advantage of OpenTelemetry’s broad set of integrations, powerful SDKs, and easy-to-use Collector, with a robust support path backing them up.” - Morgan McLean - co-founder of OpenCensus & OpenTelemetry and Director of Product Management, Splunk

What's next?

We are excited to see the rollout of the other specifications from the OpenTelemetry community and will continue to work to enable integrations with our Google Cloud products. Our hope is that the broader developer community joins us in embracing this unique step change in collecting telemetry data. We are pleased to see the adoption and support of the committee by other leading cloud providers and observability vendors. 

Get started with OpenTelemetry today

To learn more about OpenTelemetry, review the OpenTelemetry specification and start exporting traces to Google Cloud Trace.