OpenTelemetry in Focus, April 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’ll also be sharing some highlights from OpenTelemetry at KubeCon EU, which was a blast. Can’t wait for Chicago this fall!
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 some of our core repositories.
Specification
Version 1.20 has been released, and it’s a big one!
First, OpenTelemetry Protocol has been declared stable! Second, we’ve started a process to converge the Elastic Common Schema with OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions. What does this mean? At a high level, you can expect to see that semantic conventions will split out of the specification as we proceed towards aligning our standards. Please be on the look out for more information.
Other changes include:
- Changes to span and metric SDK details.
- Clean up the log bridge API.
- Key stability work for existing Semantic Conventions.
- Breaking change to
http.server.active_requestsmetric; Thehttp.status_codeattribute is no longer present.
Collector and contrib
Version 0.76.1/v1.0-rcv0011 has been released for the collector. The operator has been updated to v0.75.0, adding support for feature gates in the operator.
This release includes several bugfixes and improvements to connectors, along
with a breaking change to the confmap component.
Go
Version v1.15.0 has been released! This marks the official release of OpenTelemetry Metrics v1 in Go. Please check out the full release notes, as there are several important changes and renamings, especially if you’re using metrics.
Java
Version 1.25.0 of the Java SDK has been released, with several bugfixes and improvements. Please note that this includes a change to exponential bucket histograms, please see the release notes for details if you rely on automatic configuration of histograms.
In addition, the Java Instrumentation package has been updated to 1.25.1 as well. Highlights include:
- New instrumentation added for R2DBC, JFR streaming metrics, and ZIO 2.0
- Passwords no longer emitted from db.user when using JDBC instrumentation.
- Apache HTTP Client library now emits client metrics as well.
- Alignment with semantic conventions.
There’s much more – be sure to check out the release notes!
Project Updates
KubeCon EU saw over ten thousand cloud-native developers gather in Amsterdam, and a lot of you stopped by the OpenTelemetry booth to say hi! Hopefully some of you got your hands on our limited-edition KubeCon stickers… if not, well, there’ll be more limited edition stickers. Just not for KubeCon, because it’s come and gone.
There was a lot of great feedback that we’re excited to tackle as a project over the coming months, including:
- Improving discoverability of components for the collector.
- Increasing responsiveness to PR’s and issues.
- Finishing up the Logging Bridge API and getting logs to stability.
There were also a lot of great talks from the Observability community at KubeCon, including at Observability Day Europe. Go check it out if you have some time, there’s some really interesting real-world examples in there of how people are using OpenTelemetry!
News and Upcoming Events
OpenCensus is being sunset in July 2023. Once this has concluded, our initial goal of OpenTelemetry as a single replacement for OpenTracing and OpenCensus will have been realized!