Blog
How to Contribute to OpenTelemetry
Monday, September 15, 2025 in 2025
You might have heard about OpenTelemetry, found it interesting and want to get involved, but the path to contribution isn’t immediately clear. You might start messaging people asking to get assigned to issues, or just give a shout out saying …
How to Name Your Metrics
Thursday, September 11, 2025 in 2025
Metrics are the quantitative backbone of observability—the numbers that tell us how our systems are performing. This is the third post in our OpenTelemetry naming series, where we’ve already explored how to name spans and how to enrich them …
Your Critical Legacy App is a Black Box? Let's Change That in 5 Minutes!
Thursday, September 04, 2025 in 2025
In almost every established enterprise, there’s THAT one system. It’s the one running in the corner, performing a critical function for years. It’s reliable, but it’s also a complete black box. No one wants to touch it for fear of breaking it, …
How to Name Your Span Attributes
Wednesday, August 27, 2025 in 2025
Welcome to the second installment in our series on OpenTelemetry naming best practices. In our previous post, we explored how to name spans using the {verb} {object} pattern. Today, we’re diving into span attributes—the rich contextual data …
More Signal, Less Noise: How GitHub Issue Reactions Help Prioritize
Tuesday, August 19, 2025 in 2025
Did you know that OpenTelemetry has had more than 23,000 contributors—that’s individuals who shared issues, commits, pull requests, or comments on GitHub—since the project started? We always encourage everyone to get involved, whether that’s by …
How to Name Your Spans
Monday, August 11, 2025 in 2025
One of the most fundamental yet often overlooked aspects of good instrumentation is naming. This post is the first in a series dedicated to the art and science of naming things in OpenTelemetry. We’ll start with spans, the building blocks of a …
OTel in Practice: Alibaba's OpenTelemetry Journey
Thursday, August 07, 2025 in 2025
In the latest session of OTel in Practice, engineers Huxing Zhang and Steve Rao shared Alibaba’s journey adopting OpenTelemetry within their services. The discussion focused on a wide range of topics, from Java agents to Go compile-time …
How Should Prometheus Handle OpenTelemetry Resource Attributes? - A UX Research Report
Tuesday, July 22, 2025 in 2025
On May 29th, 2025, I wrapped up my mentorship with Prometheus through the Linux Foundation Mentorship Program. My project focused on understanding how Prometheus handles OpenTelemetry resource attributes and how that experience could be improved for …
Observability by Design: Unlocking Consistency with OpenTelemetry Weaver
Wednesday, July 02, 2025 in 2025
TL;DR OpenTelemetry Weaver helps teams build observability by design, enabling consistent, type-safe, and automated telemetry through semantic conventions. With Weaver, you can define, validate, and evolve your telemetry schemas, ensuring reliability …
Adding Automatic Instrumentation to Your App, Made Easy with the OpenTelemetry Injector
Wednesday, June 25, 2025 in 2025
As OpenTelemetry adoption grows across infrastructure and application layers, easing the operational burden of instrumentation remains a shared priority. Today, we’re excited to highlight a recent donation from Splunk to the OpenTelemetry community: …