open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification
Opentelemetry Specification
This repository contains the specifications for a standardized observability data standard and telemetry instrumentation framework. It defines unified protocols for how telemetry data is instrumented, propagated, and formatted to ensure interoperability across distributed systems.
The specification provides a vendor-neutral approach to observability, allowing telemetry data to be exported to various backends without locking into a single provider or requiring changes to application source code. It establishes a consistent protocol for capturing request flows across service boundaries to correlate activity and analyze system performance.
The framework covers a broad surface of monitoring capabilities, including system metrics collection, application log aggregation, and distributed trace capture. It defines methods for both automatic and manual instrumentation and specifies the mechanisms for context propagation and telemetry signal routing through data pipelines.
Features
- Cloud Native Observability - Implements a vendor-neutral standard for collecting metrics, logs, and traces within cloud-native and distributed environments.
- Unified Observability Data Models - Defines a consistent data model that unifies metrics, logs, and traces as timestamped wide events.
- Distributed Tracing - Specifies the protocols for recording and visualizing the lifecycle of requests as they traverse distributed service architectures.
- Tracing Context Propagation - Implements mechanisms for injecting and extracting distributed tracing headers across network boundaries to maintain request correlation.
- Application Performance Monitoring - Provides a standardized approach for tracking runtime errors and performance bottlenecks in distributed software.
- Instrumentation APIs - Provides standardized interfaces for adding both manual and automatic observability markers to application code.
- Distributed Tracing - Defines methods for tracking requests across distributed systems using unique identifiers to analyze performance and execution flow.
- Vendor-Neutral Observability Interfaces - Provides standardized APIs that decouple application code from specific monitoring providers to prevent vendor lock-in.
- Zero-Code Instrumentation - Enables monitoring agents to be attached for telemetry collection without requiring modifications to application source code.
- Telemetry Data Pipelines - Provides a configurable layer for ingesting, parsing, and transforming raw observability data before export.
- OTLP Telemetry Routing - Routes observability data through processors and filters using OpenTelemetry standards.
- Distributed Log Aggregation - Collects and unifies timestamped event records from multiple distributed services for centralized monitoring.
- Telemetry Exporters - Pushes internal performance metrics and logs to various third-party observability platforms using a neutral standard.
- Instrumentation Libraries - Supplies libraries for adding custom tracking and tracing directly into application code via manual instrumentation.
- System Metrics Collection - Records system-level performance metrics over time to monitor resource usage and software health.
- Tracing And Profiling - Framework for cloud-native observability.
Star history
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