Announcing OpenTelemetry: the merger of OpenCensus and OpenTracing

I’m excited to announce that OpenTelemetry is now a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) sandbox project. You can read more about OpenTelemetry’s origins in A Brief History of OpenTelemetry (So Far) on the CNCF blog.

OpenTelemetry is created as a merger of the OpenCensus and OpenTracing projects. This project aspires to make robust, portable telemetry a built-in feature of any software. It allows you to collect low-overhead telemetry from the entirety of a modern software stack.

Microsoft is an active member of OpenTelemetry community. We joined OpenCensus with the idea of built-in telemetry in mind. Over time, the project became more popular – it now has large partners making big investments and a broad base of community contributors.

OpenTelemetry is a vendor neutral system. Once telemetry collection is configured, you can observe it with the monitoring and observability tool you chose. You will also be able to use the full power of Azure Monitor to observe and monitor the full stack of your application. We are excited with the potential of OpenTelemetry to better enable experiences in Azure Monitor — from the elaborate triage and diagnostics experiences with Application Map and End-to-End Transaction Diagnostics to the advanced Machine Learning data analysis to create dynamic thresholds for alerts.

While OpenTelemetry has many open source and vendor-licensed observability solutions providing guidance, we always want as many end-users involved as possible. The single most valuable thing any end-user can do is also one of the easiest: check out the work we’re doing and provide feedback, via GitHub, Gitter, email, or whatever feels easiest.

Of course, we also welcome code contributions to OpenTelemetry itself – code contributions that add OpenTelemetry support to existing software projects, documentation, blog posts, and more.

Join us to build a modern and powerful OpenTelemetry project!

Questions or feedback? Let us know in the comments below.

Sergey Kanzhelev

Principal Software Engineer, Microsoft

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