The OpenTelemetry Demo Turns 1(.4)

The OTel Demo turns 1.4

It’s hard to believe as we prepare our 1.4.0 release but the OpenTelemetry demo is turning 1 year old and it’s been 6 months since we declared general availability with our 1.0.0 release.

Project Milestones

The demo has achieved remarkable milestones in its first year, with more than 70 contributors, 20 official vendor forks, 780 GitHub stars, and 180K Docker pulls. The project team has been hard at work adding new capabilities and improving on existing ones with more than 460 merged PRs, 5 re-written services in new languages, and 7 brand new components / services.

Time flies when you’re stabilizing semantic conventions. But what’s actually changed between our 1.0.0 and 1.4.0 releases? Quite a lot actually.

The Highlights

  • 2x build time improvements despite adding additional services
  • Support added for arm64 architectures (M1 and M2 Macs)
  • Async support using Kafka and the new Fraud Detection (Kotlin) / Accounting (Go) services
  • Kubernetes manifest to enable Kubernetes deployment without using requiring Helm
  • More out of the box dashboards like our Collector Data Flow Dashboard
  • A myriad of frontend bugfixes
  • Our first Connector in the Collector to demonstrate how telemetry pipelines can be linked
  • New OTel SDKs like the Java logging SDK and JavaScript / Go Metric SDK
  • New manual metric instruments in the Ad, Currency, Product Catalog services
  • PHP no-code change auto-instrumentation
  • Browser and compute resource detectors that enrich our data with infrastructure information
  • More feature flag scenarios like generating a failure for every 10th Ad shown
  • General stability improvements to fix service restarts

For detailed changes, check out our in depth release notes or changelog.

Get Involved

Our contributors are essential to all of this and the project team can’t thank them enough. New development is constantly ongoing as we add new capabilities and the community’s tools evolve. If you’d like to help, check out our contributing guidance or join our Slack channel.