Best of OpenTelemetry — 2025

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   Article

   Hacker News·22w

   Your Logs Are Lying To You

   Traditional logging practices fail in modern distributed systems because they produce fragmented, context-poor log lines that are difficult to search and correlate. The solution is "wide events" (also called canonical log lines): emitting one comprehensive, structured event per request per service that contains all relevant context—user data, business metrics, infrastructure details, and error information. This approach transforms debugging from text searching into structured querying, enabling complex questions to be answered with simple SQL-like queries. Key implementation strategies include building events throughout the request lifecycle, using tail-based sampling to keep all errors while sampling successful requests, and deliberately instrumenting code with business context rather than relying on auto-instrumentation alone.

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   Article

   Hacker News·49w

   CI/CD Observability with OpenTelemetry - A Step by Step Guide

   OpenTelemetry can provide comprehensive observability for CI/CD pipelines by capturing traces and metrics from GitHub Actions workflows. The setup involves configuring the OpenTelemetry Collector with a GitHub receiver that ingests webhook events as traces and scrapes repository metrics via GitHub APIs. This approach enables end-to-end visibility, performance optimization, error detection, and dependency analysis for CI/CD pipelines, replacing traditional ad-hoc monitoring methods with a unified observability framework.

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   Article

   Supabase·52w

   Open Data Standards: Postgres, OTel, and Iceberg

   The post discusses emerging open data standards in the data world including Postgres, Open Telemetry (OTel), and Iceberg. These standards are underpinned by important open source tenets: OSI-approved licensing, the feasibility of self-hosting, and vendor neutrality. Postgres has become a standard due to its compatibility across platforms and non-ownership by any single entity. OTel is gaining traction among major cloud providers for its telemetry capabilities, while Iceberg is leading in OLAP standards. The emphasis is on achieving portability and interoperability, particularly with AWS's S3, enhancing data management and reducing vendor lock-in.

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   Article

   Coralogix·1y

   Using the OpenTelemetry Operator to boost your observability

   Discover how the OpenTelemetry Operator simplifies observability in Kubernetes by auto-collecting trace data and integrating with Coralogix using Helm charts. This setup requires no code changes, offering easy auto-instrumentation for supported languages, enabling trace data visualization and analysis without extensive configuration.

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   Article

   OpenTelemetry·1y

   OpenTelemetry Logging and You

   OpenTelemetry provides a comprehensive logging framework that includes logs, events, and spans. Logs are any telemetry data emitted through a log pipeline via the Logs API, while events are a specific type of log with a defined schema. Spans differ from events by having durations and hierarchical relationships. The design emphasizes correlating all telemetry signals through context for a cohesive observability solution.

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   Article

   Coralogix·1y

   Istio Zero-Code Instrumentation

   Traces in Istio environments often appear broken because of inadequate context propagation, leading to fragmented spans. Traditionally, fixing this requires manually adding header propagation in each service, which is impractical for large systems. OpenTelemetry's zero-code instrumentation offers a solution by automatically injecting tracing libraries and ensuring proper trace context propagation without modifying application code. This approach provides complete end-to-end tracing, enabling deeper observability across services with minimal developer effort.

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   Article

   CNCF·24w

   Building microservices the easy way with Dapr

   Dapr is a CNCF graduated project that simplifies microservices development by providing a sidecar runtime that handles distributed system concerns like messaging, pub-sub, service communication, storage, and secrets management. Built with observability in mind, Dapr automatically propagates traces and metrics across asynchronous and synchronous systems without requiring manual instrumentation. Recent additions include workflow orchestration, AI/LLM integration through a Conversation API, and Dapr Agents for durable autonomous workflows. The project was open source from inception, joined CNCF as an incubating project in 2021, and graduated in October 2024 with thousands of contributors from hundreds of organizations.

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   Article

   Milan Jovanović·48w

   Monitoring .NET Applications with OpenTelemetry and Grafana

   Learn how to implement comprehensive observability for .NET applications using OpenTelemetry and Grafana Cloud. The guide covers installing OpenTelemetry packages, configuring automatic instrumentation for ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework, and other libraries, setting up OTLP export to Grafana Cloud, and viewing traces and logs in unified dashboards. This setup provides distributed tracing, log correlation, and monitoring capabilities that scale from single services to complex microservice architectures.

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   Article

   mlflow·21w

   AI Observability for Every TypeScript LLM Stack

   MLflow 3.6 introduces automatic tracing integrations for TypeScript and JavaScript LLM frameworks including Vercel AI SDK, LangChain.js, LangGraph.js, Mastra, Anthropic, and Gemini. These integrations use OpenTelemetry to send traces to MLflow's tracking server, capturing prompt/response payloads, token usage, tool results, and errors. Setup requires minimal configuration—typically just pointing an OTLP endpoint to your MLflow server and wrapping SDK clients. MLflow can be deployed via Docker Compose or managed cloud services, eliminating the need for a Python environment alongside JavaScript stacks.

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    Article

    Charity·32w

    Got opinions on observability? I could use your help (once more, with feeling)

    Charity Majors is seeking community input for the second edition of her observability book, specifically requesting experiences and opinions on vendor migrations, cost management strategies for traditional three-pillar architectures, observability team structures, OpenTelemetry adoption decisions, and build-vs-buy considerations. She emphasizes that vendor engineering and software procurement are high-leverage activities requiring deep technical expertise, and shares specific questions about managing observability tools at scale, including migration playbooks, cost control tactics, and instrumentation automation.

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    Article

    Grafana Labs·1y

    Grafana Drilldown: first-class OpenTelemetry support now available for metrics

    Grafana Labs has added first-class support for OpenTelemetry in its Metrics Drilldown tool. This integration allows users to seamlessly explore and filter metrics using OpenTelemetry resource attributes alongside Prometheus labels. The new features include automatic query writing, context-aware filtering, and a consolidated interface, significantly simplifying the process of gaining insights into distributed system performance.

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    Article

    Charity·29w

    The Pillar Is A Lie

    A critical examination of the "three pillars of observability" (metrics, logs, traces) framework, arguing it's primarily a marketing construct that leads to expensive, siloed tooling. The piece advocates for unified storage models (observability 2.0) that treat all telemetry signals as interconnected structured data, eliminating the need to hop between separate systems. It clarifies that OpenTelemetry uses "signals" as the technical term, not "pillars," and explains how modern observability tools can store data once while deriving multiple signal types from the same source, reducing costs and cognitive load.

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    Article

    All Things Open·21w

    6 must-read Linux and open source tutorials of the year

    A curated roundup of six practical tutorials covering diverse open source topics: DDEV for unified local development across 26 frameworks, limitations of AI coding assistants, tldr-pages as a modern alternative to man pages, implementing OpenTelemetry observability in Django applications, FreeDOS 1.4's 30th anniversary release with retrocomputing features, and ten essential open source tools for everyday use. The collection spans modern development workflows, AI tooling critique, documentation improvements, application monitoring, and computing heritage preservation.

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    Article

    ClickHouse·46w

    What's new in ClickStack?

    ClickStack introduces native JSON support in beta, delivering up to 9x faster queries compared to the previous Map type implementation. The JSON type preserves data types, reduces I/O operations, and handles deeply nested observability data more efficiently. Updates include OpenTelemetry collector integration, HyperDX UI improvements, Helm chart enhancements, CSV export functionality, and Docker image size optimizations. The new JSON schema stores each unique path as a sub-column, eliminating the need for query-time casting and enabling more intuitive querying of complex nested structures.

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    Article

    OpenTelemetry·1y

    OpenTelemetry Go 2025 Goals

    The OpenTelemetry Go team has outlined their goals for 2025, focusing on integrating new semantic conventions, enhancing SDK self-observability, stabilizing Go runtime metrics, and finalizing the Logs API and `otelhttp` instrumentation. These initiatives aim to improve data quality, observability, and developer experience within the OpenTelemetry ecosystem.

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    Article

    OpenTelemetry·29w

    OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation Marks the First Release

    OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation (OBI) has reached its first alpha release after being donated by Grafana Labs. OBI provides zero-code, automatic instrumentation for applications across all programming languages by operating at the protocol level using eBPF technology. It captures metrics and traces without requiring code changes, restarts, or performance impact, supporting protocols like HTTP/HTTPS, gRPC, SQL, Redis, MongoDB, and Kafka. While excellent for getting started with observability and instrumenting compiled binaries, it works best when combined with traditional OpenTelemetry SDKs, particularly for complex distributed tracing scenarios in certain languages and frameworks.

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    Article

    InfoQ·34w

    Kubernetes 1.34 Released with KYAML, Traffic Routing Controls, and Improved Observability

    Kubernetes 1.34 introduces KYAML, a streamlined YAML subset to reduce configuration errors, enhanced traffic routing controls for network operators, and production-grade tracing for kubelet and API server using OpenTelemetry. The release includes 58 enhancements with improved security features like X.509 certificate management for pods, ServiceAccount tokens for image credential providers, and ordered namespace deletion to prevent security vulnerabilities.

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    Article

    Milan Jovanović·1y

    Better Request Tracing with User Context in ASP.NET Core

    Adding user context to request tracing in ASP.NET Core enhances troubleshooting, performance monitoring, and user behavior analysis. The post explains how to implement middleware that enriches logs with user IDs, improving the ability to track user journeys and quickly identify issues. It also discusses handling PII concerns and suggests expanding context enrichment with feature flags and tenant information.

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    Article

    Laravel News·1y

    Open Telemetry Package for Laravel

    LaraOTel OpenTelemetry package for Laravel helps measure performance in jobs, services, database queries, and more. It uses watchers for tracking authentications, cache operations, database queries, job executions, redis activities, events, HTTP client requests, and logging. Custom spans can be created for specific performance measurement. The package supports Zipkin and Jaeger for visualization and requires PHP OpenTelemetry extension. Full instructions and source code are available on GitHub.

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    Article

    OpenTelemetry·36w

    How to Name Your Metrics

    OpenTelemetry metrics should focus on what is being measured rather than who is measuring it. Service names, units, and deployment context belong in attributes, not metric names. This approach enables cross-service aggregation, reduces namespace clutter, and creates reusable dashboards. Clean metric names like 'transaction.count' with service.name attributes are more maintainable than traditional patterns like 'payment_service_transaction_total'.

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    Article

    Svelte Blog·40w

    Introducing integrated observability in SvelteKit

    SvelteKit now includes built-in OpenTelemetry tracing support and a dedicated instrumentation.server.ts file for setting up observability monitoring. The framework can emit traces for handle hooks, load functions, form actions, and remote functions, with spans including request attributes and context information. The instrumentation file ensures monitoring tools are loaded before application code, with support across all official SvelteKit adapters that have server components.

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    Article

    JetBrains·38w

    Koog 0.4.0 Is Out: Observable, Predictable, and Deployable Anywhere You Build

    Koog 0.4.0 introduces observability features with OpenTelemetry support for W&B Weave and Langfuse, enabling developers to monitor AI agents in production. The release includes drop-in Ktor integration for easy API deployment, native structured output with automatic validation and retries, GPT-5 support with custom parameters, production-grade retry mechanisms, and built-in DeepSeek client support.

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    Article

    Last9·44w

    Monitor Nginx with OpenTelemetry Tracing

    Learn how to instrument NGINX with OpenTelemetry to capture distributed traces across your entire request path. The guide covers a 5-minute Docker setup using the official nginx:1.25-otel image, production configuration patterns with conditional sampling, and integration with the OpenTelemetry Collector. It includes performance benchmarks showing minimal overhead (0.8% CPU, 3MB memory), Kubernetes deployment patterns, and advanced techniques for correlating logs with traces. The setup enables end-to-end visibility from NGINX through backend services to databases, helping identify bottlenecks in seconds rather than hours.

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    Article

    A Java geek·1y

    Even more OpenTelemetry - Kubernetes special

    The post discusses the transition from Docker Compose to Kubernetes using Helm charts, focusing on incorporating Kubernetes-related features into an OpenTelemetry demo. It highlights the use of vCluster for separating app pods from infrastructure pods, Traefik as an ingress controller, and OpenTelemetry collectors for monitoring. The post also introduces the instrumentation of OpenTelemetry-free apps using Kubernetes instrumentation and mentions adding a new Quarkus component.

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    Article

    Foojay.io·24w

    OpenTelemetry Guide

    Spring Boot 4 introduces native OpenTelemetry support through a single starter dependency, simplifying observability implementation. The guide covers configuring metrics, traces, and logs using the OTLP protocol, including step-by-step setup with Micrometer integration, Logback appender configuration, and Docker Compose testing with Grafana. This eliminates the need for multiple dependencies and Java agents required in Spring Boot 3, while providing seamless integration with GraalVM and AOT compilation.

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