Much Ado About OpenTelemetry

There is so much good work that OpenTelemetry has done in the software industry, specifically around the domain of observability, in the last five years. Bringing users and vendors together to define the future of telemetry? Check! Unify logs, traces, and metrics under a completely vendor-neutral API? Check! Deprecate other standards by bringing their collaborators to the table to ensure their use cases are met? CHECK!

I joined OpenTelemetry back in 2019, and at the time, many of these goals seemed somewhat far-fetched. It was hard to imagine that any one project would successfully encompass all the things we've done so far. OTel really has so much to offer:

• Libraries allowing users to instrument their code and send data to any vendor in 11 different languages
• Semantic Conventions detailing what telemetry data should look like to simplify analysis by providing consistent, high-quality data
• the Collector, allowing users to decouple the source and destination of their telemetry, making it easy to swap components as needed without touching application code

And that is just a subset of all the things OpenTelemetry does today. The level of collaboration across end users and observability vendors has been fantastic, and being part of this has been such a rewarding journey. At the end of the day, everything in OTel depends on the end user journey, which has always been something dear to me. This has been a big reason for my recent involvement with the Configuration Working Group and the Security Special Interest Group.

I'm really excited to be joining Honeycomb this week as a Staff Software Engineer to allow me to keep pushing OpenTelemetry forward and to improve the lives of end users. Honeycomb was the first tool that introduced me to event logging, and distributed tracing back in 2018, and it's a privilege to join this fantastic group of humans.