OpenTelemetry.io 2024 review

As 2024 draws to a close, we reflect on the year and share some insights and accomplishments from SIG Communications, the team responsible for managing this website, blog, and documentation.

Key achievements of 2024

Several key accomplishments stand out in our efforts to make OpenTelemetry documentation more accessible, user-friendly, and impactful for our global community.

Multilingual documentation

A major accomplishment this year was achieving multilingual support with the launch of our localized documentation. Thanks to the efforts of localization teams, over 120 pages were translated from English into other languages. The available translations include:

• Chinese
• French
• Japanese
• Portuguese
• Spanish

A big thank you to everyone who contributed to this initiative. These translations make OpenTelemetry more accessible, enhancing the user experience for our global audience.

Information Architecture (IA) improvements

To improve readership experience and make OpenTelemetry documentation more intuitive and accessible, we undertook important updates to our Information Architecture (IA) this year. These changes were driven by the need to better organize content, clarify the purpose of key sections, and provide a more structured and user-friendly experience for end-users and developers.

Key IA updates include:

• Renaming the Instrumentation section to Language APIs & SDKs to better reflect its purpose and set clearer expectations for users.

• Moving Automatic Instrumentation into the new Zero-code Instrumentation section to more clearly distinguish between instrumentation APIs & SDKs and tools like the Java agent, used to inject telemetry.

• Following these updates, the Java SIG proposed and reorganized their documentation, introducing substantial improvements to the structure and clarity of the content. The bulk of this effort is reflected in these PRs:

  • Refactor Java SDK and configuration #4966
  • Refactor Java instrumentation #5276
  • Move performance to Java agent, merge Javadoc into API page #5590

  Kudos to Jack Berg and the Java SIG for their exemplary leadership in improving language-SIG documentation!

Next year, we aim to redesign how OpenTelemetry is introduced to beginners, ensuring a smoother and more accessible learning experience. If you’re passionate about making OpenTelemetry easier to understand and use, we’d love your contributions — join us in this collaborative effort.

Year in numbers

Contributions

In December 2022, we started monthly releases of the website so that we could regularly summarize activities and highlight significant contributions. These releases allow us to track progress over time and perform long-term comparisons.

For instance, comparing the periods December 2022 to November 2023 and December 2023 to November 2024, we observed an upward trend in contributions:

• Commits increased 33% from 1,011 to 1,340
• Contributors grew 15% from 92 to 106
• The only metric that declined was the number of files changed, which decreased from 1,864 to 1,624 (13%)

Since the repository’s inception in April 2019, the community has seen remarkable growth, with:

• 3,824 merged pull requests (3,982 commits) by
• 768 contributors

Thank you to every contributor for helping to build and improve the OpenTelemetry website. Your efforts make a difference!

Which pages were the most popular?

According to our publicly available analytics data, opentelemetry.io was viewed 12 million times across 4 million sessions this year. This marks a 16% increase over last year’s nearly 10 million views and over 3 million sessions.

The most popular pages and sections of the documentation were:

Fun trivia

Did you know that:

• “OpenTelemetry” occurs 7.3K times in the English website pages, making it the 3rd most frequent word after “the” and “to.” The word “collector” is used 3.2K times, putting it in 11th place!

• The Collector landing page has been the most updated file since its creation, with 91 changes.

• With 511 commits (27K additions, and 10K deletions) the opentelemetrybot is the fourth most active contributor. Go bots!

• The record for the PR with the most comments this year—and of all time is held by:

  • Generative AI updates blog post (#5575), with 150 comments!

  A close second goes to:

  • Portuguese translation of Go instrumentation, with 146 comments

Amazing Community

With 1.3K PRs, we collectively contributed an equally impressive number of reviews to ensure that content is accurate, valuable, aligned with our documentation goals, and easy to read and understand.

In addition to PRs, contributors created nearly 500 issues and engaged in many discussions, reporting bugs, suggesting improvements, and driving collaboration. Each of these efforts reflects our community’s dedication to maintaining the quality of OpenTelemetry docs.

We are fortunate to have many contributors who take on responsibilities, including:

• Approvers and maintainers from other SIGs who co-own parts of the docs
• Localization teams who oversee translations into various languages
• The OpenTelemetry community, whose contributions make all the difference — every drive-by edit and typo fix counts!
• SIG Communications team members, for their contributions and for orchestrating it all!

Thank you to everyone who contributed their time and expertise to OpenTelemetry docs this year!

Join us in 2025

A big shout-out to everyone for making 2024 a successful year! We look forward to continuing our collaboration in 2025.

Whether you’re an end user, a contributor, or simply enthusiastic about OpenTelemetry, we welcome your participation. You can get involved by raising issues, participating in discussions, or submitting PRs.

You can also join us:

• On the CNCF Slack at any one of the many #otel-prefixed channels.
• In Comms meetings, held every other Monday at 10:00 AM Pacific time.

Together, we can make 2025 another amazing year for opentelemetry.io!

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