OpenTelemetry Roundup for Kubecon EU

Well howdy there partner, Phillip here with a rootin’ tootin’ OTel update for ya, right on time for Kubecon EU!

OpenTelemetry SDK distribution for Python

We’ve released an SDK distribution for Python. As with our other distributions, it’s focused on several things:

• Making it as easy as possible to send data directly to Honeycomb with minimal configuration, but the right configuration knobs you can dial later to fit your needs
• Multi-span attributes via a Baggage Span Processor
• Local trace visualization that emits a Honeycomb trace URL to standard out when you create a trace
• Deterministic sampling

It’s easy as heck to get started. First, install some packages:

python -m pip install honeycomb-opentelemetry --pre

Then, install instrumentation libraries that match your dependencies:

opentelemetry-bootstrap --action=install

And finally, configure some environment variables:

export OTEL_SERVICE_NAME="your-service-name"
export HONEYCOMB_API_KEY="your-api-key"
opentelemetry-instrument python myapp.py

That’s it! Read more about the different configuration options and some sweet how-tos in our docs or run our sample apps to try things out yourself.

Kubernetes: now even easier with the OTel Operator

The OpenTelemetry Operator has been around for a while, but not everyone knows about it. People should know about it. We’ve contributed to the operator a bunch so that it’s more reliable and easy to use no matter what language your services in a cluster are using.

We like to think of the operator as an easy button for onboarding OpenTelemetry when you’re running in Kubernetes. It lets you do two important things:

• Install an OpenTelemetry Collector into your cluster for every service to send data to
• Inject automatic instrumentation into each of your services in a cluster

We’ve heard from customers with hundreds to thousands of services that they need a standard way to get automatic instrumentation loaded into each service. Clearly, at that scale, it’s unreasonable to go into each service and manually set it up. That’s why the OpenTelemetry Operator is awesome: it lets you solve this problem in a standard, supported way.

Coming soon: Go auto-instrumentation eBPF

For all your Go developers, there’s an exciting new project that’s taking shape in OpenTelemetry: automatic instrumentation for Go. Because Go compiles directly to machine code, the community had to reach for eBPF to extract data from the OS corresponding to use of libraries and instrument them.

Additionally, we’ve contributed support for the agent into the OpenTelemetry Operator, so that your Go services in Kubernetes can also make use of it.

Come see us at Kubecon EU!

We’re in Amsterdam for the week of Kubecon EU. Come by our booth to learn more about how you can gain complete observability into your Kubernetes clusters with Honeycomb and OpenTelemetry.

Ready to check out Honeycomb with OTel? Watch a demo on how you quickly get set up and start ingesting data using Helm.