OpenTelemetry in Focus, May 2023

Welcome back to OpenTelemetry in Focus for May, 2023! The sun is shining, the sky is blue, and it’s time to run down the latest updates from the OpenTelemetry project!

Are you a maintainer with something you’d like featured here? Get in touch with me via email, or on the CNCF Slack #otel-comms channel.

Releases and Updates

Here are the latest updates from some of our core repositories.

Specification

Version 1.21 has been released with a variety of important changes, including:

  • Log Bridge API and SDK have been marked stable.
  • Add groundwork for file-based configuration of OpenTelemetry.
  • OpenCensus compatibility specification marked stable.
Collector

Version 0.78.0 has been released, along with 0.77. These releases address several important core issues, including:

  • Batch processor can now batch by attribute keys.
  • Initial support for internal OpenTelemetry SDK usage.
  • Default queue size for exporters reduced from 5000 to 1000.
  • Feature gate added to disable internal metrics with high cardinality.

In addition, collector-contrib has been updated with several changes and enhancements. The Operator now supports Golang & Apache HTTP server auto-instrumentation in addition to Python, Java, Node.js, and .NET.

Go

Version 1.16.0/0.39.0 marks the stable release of the OpenTelemetry Metric API in Go.

Java

Version 1.26 is the Release Candidate for the Log Bridge. This release enables log appenders to bridge logs from existing log frameworks, allowing users to configure the Log SDK and dictate how logs are processed and exported. In addition, opentelemetry-opentracing-shim is now stable, as well as other bugfixes and improvements.

Java Instrumentation includes instrumentation support for vertx-sql-client, as well as several bug fixes.

JavaScript

Version 1.13 has been released, adding support for gRPC log export. In addition, a couple bugs have been fixed.

Python

Version 1.18 adds a new feature that allows histogram aggregation to be set using an environment variable, as well as various bugfixes related to resource detection, exporting, and suppressing instrumentation.

  • Add ability to select histogram aggregation with an environment variable
  • Move protobuf encoding to its own package
  • Add experimental feature to detect resource detectors in auto instrumentation
  • Fix exporting of ExponentialBucketHistogramAggregation from opentelemetry.sdk.metrics.view
  • Fix headers types mismatch for OTLP Exporters

.NET

Version 1.5.0-rc1 includes many bugfixes across a variety of packages.

Project and Community Updates

YouTube and Meeting Recordings

Recently, you may have noticed that the OpenTelemetry YouTube channel stopped publishing meeting recordings. In the future, you will be able to access recordings, transcripts, and chat history for meetings through the Zoom cloud. Please see this issue for more information.

We’ll be publishing more curated content on the OpenTelemetry channel starting in June, including interviews with end-users and more. Please keep an eye on the OpenTelemetry Blog for updates.

From the blog…

OpenTelemetry Lambda Layers are now available. Congratulations to the Functions-as-a-Service SIG on the release!

A new blog series discussing Histograms vs. Summaries and Exponential Histograms has gone up on the blog, giving an overview of this important topic.

News and Upcoming Events

OpenTelemetry in Practice is coming up on June 8th at 10:00 PT/13:00 ET/19:00 CET featuring Iris Dyrmishi of Farfetch. Please see the #otel-comms channel on the CNCF Slack for more info.

Observability Day is coming to KubeCon North America in Chicago! Keep an eye on the KubeCon page for more information. A call for proposals is expected to be available in early June.