OpenTelemetry in Practice - Issue 2
Welcome to OpenTelemetry in Practice! In this monthly newsletter you’ll find pointers, resources, and news–the latest in teaching your software to teach you what’s going on.
What is all this? Getting Started with OpenTelemetry
Yuri Shkuro of Jaeger writes about the 6 pillars of observability. There’s widespread disagreement in the industry about how many pillars there are, but no-one can disagree Yuri makes a really smart rundown of concepts worth paying attention to in the space.
https://medium.com/@YuriShkuro/temple-six-pillars-of-observability-4ac3e3deb402
Are you interested in contributing to OpenTelemetry? Antoine Toulme from Splunk talks about getting started. https://community.splunk.com/t5/Community-Blog/A-Guide-to-the-new-Contributor-to-OpenTelemetry/ba-p/612334
What are all these words? Concepts in OpenTelemetry
How do you choose what to sample? If we go for complete fidelity, we very quickly end up with an expensive storage bill. Reese Lee of New Relic writes about the theory of tail sampling: https://opentelemetry.io/blog/2022/tail-sampling/.
How do you decide how to set up a collector and a data pipeline? Christian Dennig of Partly Cloudy gives a great example of instrumenting for .NET, sending to a collector and a pipeline, and delivering the pipeline into Grafana & Prometheus. https://partlycloudy.blog/2022/08/22/asp-net-custom-metrics-with-opentelemetry-collector-prometheus-grafana/
Are you excited yet? Emerging Developments in OpenTelemetry
Ever heard of test in prod? How about use OpenTelemetry to fix OpenTelemetry? Severin Neumann and his team from Cisco have tips for you https://opentelemetry.io/blog/2022/debug-otel-with-otel/
It’s Governance Committee election season! If you’ve made a few contributions to the project, you’re probably eligible for membership and voting. Come shape the future of telemetry with us.
Announcing the 2022 OpenTelemetry Governance Committee Election | OpenTelemetry
The OpenTelemetry project is excited to announce the 2022 OpenTelemetry Governance Committee (GC) election. Nominations are due by end-of-day on 7 October 2022, with the ratification happening by 8 October 2022 and a list of eligible candidates will be shared on 9 October 2022. Voting will take place between 18 October 2022 and 20 October 2022, and the final election results will be announced 22 October 2022. Vote! If you are a member of standing in the OpenTelemetry community, we invite you to participate in this election to ensure that the community is well-represented in the Governance Committee.
Ask Miss O11y
After reading that Antoine Toulme piece, I’m curious about getting involved in OpenTelemetry. But I don’t want to land pull requests all day and I’m not very good at GitHub. What should I do?
-Lost in Lambdas
Dear Lost in Lambdas,
Conveniently, I just did that, so I’m here to help you get onboarded faster. You’re doing the right thing by reading this newsletter, and o11y.news is also a great newsletter for you to subscribe to.
Your first destination should be the CNCF Slack - the place where people do most collaboration around the project. Once there, join the #opentelemetry channel and have a search through the channels beginning with the prefix #otel- to see if there are other channels that seem particularly interesting to you. You can find me in the Slack, too.
#otel-comms and #otel-user-research (End User working group) frequently have projects of interest to non-code contributors. In Comms you’ll write blog posts and documentation and work on the public face of the project; the End User working group does lots of events, interviews, and relationship building, with the idea of reaching people who are implementing OpenTelemetry.
You also might want to investigate whether your company is a CNCF member, if you’re working, and whether there are any other OpenTelemetry contributors at the company. If there aren’t contributors who you know, try attending a SIG meeting of the most interesting SIG, and asking if anyone could meet with you. You’ll generally find people are happy to help you find tasks.
Good luck and happy contributing!
-Rynn Mancuso
Got a question for Miss O11y? misso11y@honeycomb.io or reply to this newsletter.
Who else is into this? Upcoming OpenTelemetry Events
Stand up and be counted in this Open Telemetry User survey.
Come to the OpenTelemetry in Practice meetup! For people like you who find OpenTelemetry useful. In October, Jessitron & Daniel Kim will be reprising their popular Kubernetes talks just in time for Kubecon - there will be lots of time for discussion and a special announcement about OpenTelemetry events at KubeCon!
Bring your questions to the OpenTelemetry Lean Coffee.
The next ones are October 11th (US time - 10 AM PT) and October 18th (EMEA time - 10 AM BST). If you’re interested in helping us launch an APAC discussion group, hit reply to this email!
Introducing new resources for OpenTelemetry end users to connect and discover best practices | OpenTelemetry
The content of this post has moved to End-user Resources, where it will be kept up-to-date as more end-user resources become available.
Want more frequent OpenTelemetry news? O11y.news has a weekly collection of links, curated by Michael Hausenblaus.
Special Section: Watch this Space
Next month, look for a special section on .NET or kubernetes.
Want to curate an OpenTelemetry newsletter section? Reach out by replying to this email.
Want to list an event or an article you wrote? Hit reply.