OpenTelemetry in Focus, February 2023
Welcome to this month’s edition of OpenTelemetry in Focus! It might be cold and snowy in much of the Northern Hemisphere, but that hasn’t frozen our progress. Read on for an overview of new releases, announcements, and other important updates.
Are you a maintainer with something you’d like featured here? Get in touch with me via email, or on the CNCF Slack #otel-comms channel.
Releases and Updates
Here are the latest updates from our core repositories.
Specification
v1.18 has been released, with a batch of semantic convention updates and clarifications on mapping and converting between Prometheus and OpenTelemetry Metrics.
Collector and contrib
v0.72 have been released with several major changes to be aware of:
- The minimum supported Golang version is now 1.19
- The host metrics receiver has removed deprecated metrics for process memory.
- The promtail receiver has been removed from collector-contrib.
- The Jaeger exporters are now deprecated, to be removed in a future release.
- Connectors have been added! These are components that act as exporters and receivers, allowing you to route data through pipelines. Please see the component docs for more information.
- Many bugfixes and enhancements.
Go
v1.14 has been released. This is the last release to support Go 1.18; 1.19 will be required in the future. Semantic conventions have been updated, resulting in changes to constant and function names. Finally, there’s a variety of bug fixes and other small changes.
Java
v1.23 has been released, bringing with it stable base2 exponential histogram aggregations and significant metrics refactoring. Semantic convention updates, improvements to SDK shutdown, and several enhancements to the SDK extensions are also in this release. Java Instrumentation has been updated as well, most notably changing HTTP span names to reflect updated semantic conventions.
PHP
v1 beta was announced at the end of January. The PHP SIG is looking forward to your feedback. In addition, the Communications SIG is planning a release of new documentation for PHP soon.
Python
v1.16 has been released with deprecations to Jaeger exporters, several performance improvements and bugfixes, and changes to Prometheus export.
.NET
v1.4 removes several deprecated extension methods.
As always, this is just a snapshot of important changes and improvements across the core projects. Make sure you thoroughly read the release notes when upgrading your OpenTelemetry dependencies.
Project Updates
The Outreachy project is looking for participants. This is an annual program that connects new open source contributors with small, self-contained projects that they can work on. There are also opportunities to volunteer to mentor these contributors. Read the blog for more information!
The Collector SIG will be starting new APAC-friendly meetings to support contributors and maintainers worldwide.
Our End-User Working Group has written up a Q&A about using OpenTelemetry with GraphQL.
News and Upcoming Events
OpenTelemetry maintainers and contributors will be in attendance at Observability Day Europe on April 18th, 2023, as part of KubeCon/CloudNativeCon Europe 2023.