opentelemetry-proto VS community

Maybe, you are asking yourself: "But I already had instrumented my applications with vendor-specific libraries and I'm using their agents and monitoring tools, why should I change to OpenTelemetry?". The answer is: maybe you're right and I don't want to encourage you to update the way how you are doing observability in your applications, that's a hard and complex task. But, if you are starting from scratch or you are not happy with your current observability infrastructure, OpenTelemetry is the best choice, independently of the backend telemetry tool that you are using. I would like to invite you to take a look at the number of exporters available in the collector contrib section, if your backend tracing tool is not there, probably it's already using the Open Telemetry Protocol (OTLP) and you will be able to use the core collector. Otherwise, you should consider changing your backend telemetry tool or contributing to the project creating a new exporter.

Here's the example payloads for OTLP over JSON and example of how to ingest them: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-proto/tree/m...

An OTLP receiver can receive data via gRPC or HTTP using the OTLP format. There are advanced configurations that you can enable via the YAML file.

Cerbos fully transitioned from OpenCensus to OpenTelemetry, a move that significantly boosts our metrics and tracing capabilities. This shift allows for more efficient integration with a variety of observability products supporting the OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP) but also offers the flexibility to use push metrics and fine-tune trace sampling. With this update, configuration through the tracing block in Cerbos files is deprecated in favor of using OpenTelemetry environment variables.

Networking is Easy (Really!) Since you install the agent directly into the environment where you are running your application, there is no complex networking. When developing in localMode, the agent listens on the common OpenTelemetry Line Protocol (OTLP) on ports 4317 & 4318 automatically.

Oh nice, thank you (and also solumos) for the links! It looks like oteps/pull/171 (merged June 2023) expanded and superseded the opentelemetry-proto/pull/346 PR (closed Jul 2022) [0]. The former resulted in merging OpenTelemetry Enhancement Proposal 156 [1], with some interesting results especially for 'Phase 2' where they implemented columnar storage end-to-end (see the Validation section [2]):

* For univariate time series, OTel Arrow is 2 to 2.5 better in terms of bandwidth reduction ... and the end-to-end speed is 3.1 to 11.2 times faster

* For multivariate time series, OTel Arrow is 3 to 7 times better in terms of bandwidth reduction ... Phase 2 has [not yet] been .. estimated but similar results are expected.

* For logs, OTel Arrow is 1.6 to 2 times better in terms of bandwidth reduction ... and the end-to-end speed is 2.3 to 4.86 times faster

* For traces, OTel Arrow is 1.7 to 2.8 times better in terms of bandwidth reduction ... and the end-to-end speed is 3.37 to 6.16 times faster

[0]: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-proto/pull/3...

[1]: https://github.com/open-telemetry/oteps/blob/main/text/0156-...

[2]: https://github.com/open-telemetry/oteps/blob/main/text/0156-...

We then modified the benchmark to encode our example data which is an opentelemetry trace data.

otel is working on their events spec https://github.com/open-telemetry/community/issues/1688

1. Agreed. It's the sink and the house attached to it, and the docs are thin and confusing as a result.

2. I had a similar experience to you. I wanted to implement a simple heartbeat in our app to get an idea of usage numbers. This is surprisingly not possible, which greatly confuses me given the name of the project. The low engagement on my question put me off and I abandoned my OpenTelemetry planning completely. [1][2]

[1] https://github.com/open-telemetry/community/discussions/1598

One of the OpenTelemetry Project's many Special Interest Groups (SIG) is the OpenTelemetry Community Demo SIG which gives support to a set of instrumented backend microservices and a web frontend app that are primarily used to showcase how to instrument a distributed system using OpenTelemetry. The application's main focus is to demonstrate the implementation process to instrument an application no matter what programming language, platform, or operating system your team is using, as well as providing different approaching techniques (automatic and manual instrumentation, metrics, baggage). All of this while following the standards and conventions defined by the official OpenTelemetry Documentation. More about the specific requirements can be found here. At Tracetest, we have always focused on becoming part of and embracing the OpenTelemetry community. One of our goals this summer was to get more involved with a core OpenTelemetry project where we could provide a meaningful contribution. The OTel demo became the best match for achieving that goal as it would not only help the community, but we at Tracetest needed a good example to test and showcase what can be done with our tool. During the version 0.7 project cycle, we created two specific tickets to get us closer to the community and start looking for things to pick up: