Company
Date Published
Author
Dotan Horovits
Word count
648
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

In the realm of DevOps observability, numerous "Open" projects, standards, and tools can be confusing due to their similar names and overlapping purposes. Key among these is OpenTelemetry, a unified set of vendor-agnostic APIs, SDKs, and tools for collecting telemetry data, which emerged from the merger of OpenTracing and OpenCensus and is now a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project. OpenTracing and OpenCensus were initial, separate efforts to create vendor-neutral APIs for distributed tracing and metrics collection, respectively, and have been integrated into OpenTelemetry. OpenMetrics aims to standardize cloud-native metrics transmission using Prometheus' wire format and is advancing towards CNCF incubation and IETF standardization. OpenSearch, developed as an open-source fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana, incorporates features from OpenDistro for Elasticsearch, after the latter's merger into OpenSearch. These projects illustrate the complexity and ongoing consolidation within the open-source observability domain, offering various tools and standards for data collection and analysis while highlighting the need for clarity amidst the proliferation of "Open" initiatives.