Why (and how) GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry

GitHub engineers have been grappling with the challenges of standardizing telemetry data across various systems, often facing interoperability issues due to different metrics and logging formats. To address this, they have adopted OpenTelemetry, which offers a unified, vendor-neutral format for telemetry signals, facilitating easier correlation and reducing the need for manual re-instrumentation. By focusing on tracing as a primary entry point to observability, OpenTelemetry allows for automatic derivation of additional signals like metrics and logs. GitHub is developing internal libraries to streamline the integration of OpenTelemetry, making it easier for developers to implement tracing efficiently, thus enhancing observability in distributed systems. The initiative aims to build intelligent dashboards and alerts while contributing back to the OpenTelemetry project, encouraging industry-wide improvements in system observability.