https://www.highlight.io/blog/podcast-ep6-otel-with-ben-sigelman

Ben Sigelman

https://twitter.com/el_bhs

OpenTelemetry

https://opentelemetry.io/

Highlight

https://www.highlight.io/

https://twitter.com/thejaykhatri

https://twitter.com/highlightio

Channels

 @highlight-io 

Summary

The journey to OpenTelemetry began with the need for a standardized way to collect monitoring data from cloud-native applications. Two open-source projects emerged to address this challenge: OpenTracing and OpenCensus. OpenTracing focused on distributed tracing, tracking requests across complex systems. OpenCensus, on the other hand, offered a wider scope, including tracing alongside metrics collection.

In 2019, recognizing the strengths of both projects and the benefits of a unified approach, OpenTracing and OpenCensus merged to form OpenTelemetry. This collaboration brought together their respective communities and fostered a single, well-supported solution for application observability. Today, OpenTelemetry is a thriving project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, offering a future-proof path for monitoring the complexities of modern software.

00:00:00:00 Cold open

00:01:32:13 Ben's introduction

00:03:21:23 Social media to Lightstep

00:06:53:11 A hard pivot for Lightstep

00:08:39:22 Starting OTel

00:13:02:09 Early days of OTel

00:15:31:15 Instrumenting Google

00:19:19:10 OTel vs Lightstep

00:24:39:19 Potential improvements

00:30:03:16 Cardinality

00:34:32:09 Outro