OpenTelemetry in Focus, March 2023
Welcome to this month’s edition of OpenTelemetry in Focus! It’s been another busy month in the OpenTelemetry community, with some big announcements and new releases from our core repositories. I’ve also put together an overview of some blog, website, and project highlights - give it a look, and tell me what you think.
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
Version 1.19 has been released with a number of important updates.
- OTLP/JSON has been declared stable.
- To clarify its purpose, the Logs API has been renamed to the Logs Bridge API.
- Semantic convention updates.
Collector and contrib
Version 0.74/v1.0-rc8 has been released for the collector, resulting in a new operator version as well. Highlights include:
- Connectors are enabled by default.
- The
spanmetricsprocessorhas been deprecated in favor of thespanmetricsconnector. Other changes have been made to the behavior of this component. - A new receiver for CloudFlare logs has been added.
- Many bugfixes and enhancements.
Go
Version v1.15.0-rc.2 has been released. Version 1.15 will ship with Metrics v1 support, and its associated stability guarantees. Other highlights of the release candidate include:
- Support for global meter providers.
- Exemplar support added for metric data.
- Several optimizations, bugfixes, and removals/deprecations.
Java
Version 1.24.0 of the Java SDK has been released, featuring several optimizations and bugfixes to the metrics SDK.
In addition, the Java Instrumentation package has been updated to 1.24 as well, featuring several new instrumentations and fixes:
- Apache Pulsar and Jodd-Http can now be instrumented automatically via the agent.
- Ktor and Spring Webflux libraries can be instrumented using the library.
- Improvements to the RxJava2, Cassandra, Spring Boot, and other instrumentation packages.
Python
Version 1.17 has been released with a handful of fixes and improvements, most notably support for exponential histograms!
Project Updates
The proposal to merge the Elastic Common Schema (ECS) into OpenTelemetry has been passed! This is a big step towards reducing competing standards and aligning the open source observability ecosystem around a common data model.
A proposal to donate OpenTelemetry Instrumentation for Android has been made. You can follow along with the discussion in the linked issue – exciting to see more options for client observability in OpenTelemetry!
We’re on a mission to reduce the number of unanswered OpenTelemetry questions on Stack Overflow. Be sure to check out the Stack Overflow Watch in the Monthly Highlights to learn how you can help, and get some cool swag in the process.
The Logs Bridge Specification is in the final stretch before merge. If you’d like to help proofread, or have any comments, now’s the time to get involved!
News and Upcoming Events
The schedule for KubeCon EU is up, and there’s a lot of OpenTelemetry to go around! We’ll also be at Observability Day EU – which will be live-streamed, including project updates and a panel discussion featuring several OpenTelemetry maintainers. Will you be there in-person? Find me (I’m the guy with the hat) and say hi – I’d love to meet you (and I’ll have some stickers to give away). We’ll also have a project booth, so swing by – and stay tuned for another blog detailing our full involvement at KubeCon EU.