OTel in Practice: Alibaba's OpenTelemetry Journey
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 instrumentation, and of course Gen-AI observability!
Focusing on Java, Alibaba initially used an in-house solution based on Pinpoint, but faced limitations with framework support and asynchronous context propagation. It was then that they decided to migrate to OpenTelemetry to leverage its strong ecosystem and status as an industry standard.
They took us through their migration process, how they first forked the OTel Java agent to quickly add necessary custom features, such as profiling capabilities and support for frameworks popular in China, and how they now moved onto a more maintainable model that relies on the official/upstream agent directly, bundling it in with the rest of their custom extensions.
Another key innovation they shared is their Go compile-time instrumentation approach, which provides automatic instrumentation for Go applications without requiring any code changes. This project has been donated to the OTel community and is now a collaborative effort between Alibaba, Datadog, and Quesma.
OpenTelemetry is now widely used at Alibaba, providing end-to-end observability for cloud services and modern applications, and the team remains committed to contributing their enhancements back to the upstream project.
Thanks Huxing and Steve for joining us. Catch up on the recording below!