oteps VS community

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 It looks like oteps/pull/171 (merged June 2023) expanded and superseded the opentelemetry-proto/pull/346 PR (closed Jul 2022) [0].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-...

https://github.com/open-telemetry/oteps/issues/139

It takes a lot of time and effort to bake a cross-vendor cross-language standard.

This. The statelessness of the OTLP is by design. I did consider stateful designs with e.g. shared state dictionary compression but eventually chose not to, so that the intermediaries can remain stateless.

An extension to OTLP that uses shared state (and columnar encoding) to achieve more compact representation and is suitable for the last network leg in the data delivery path has been proposed and may become a reality in the future: https://github.com/open-telemetry/oteps/pull/171

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: