The team behind OpenTelemetry has announced the observability project’s move into beta phase, giving the starting signal for integration into applications for first tests.

OpenTelemetry is the result of a merger between observability projects OpenCensus and OpenTracing, which was announced in March 2019 and made its way into the CNCF Sandbox shortly after. It consists of a number of APIs, libraries, agents, and collector services for a variety of languages that, when combined with other tools, are meant to help users get insight into what their applications are doing.

Maturing into beta seems to be a gradual process here, with the OpenTelemetry Collector, and APIs as well as SDKs for Erlang, Go, Java, JavaScript, and Python making the move first. Along with those go language-specific exporters to send traces and metrics to supported backends such as Jager and Prometheus, as well as API integrations for “at least one popular HTTP framework, gRPC, and at least one popular storage client”. 

Said to be next on the list for graduation are the .NET SDK and the Java auto-instrumentation agent. 

While this might sound enticing to try, and is indeed wished for by the project maintainers, hence the announcement on a variety of channels, it has to be clear that the OpenTelemetry components are still subject to change. A lack of thorough testing and API stability also means the components are currently unfit for production. This makes the release more of a test balloon for those who want to integrate it into a service offering at some point or get started evaluating the project.

Despite the focus on moving the project’s stability forward, OpenTelemetry recently saw the introduction of a registry for components such as integrations, collectors, and integration, which can now be accessed via its website. The team also just started a special interest group aiming to add logging functionality to the project. More details on that can be found in the OpenTelemetry blog.