OpenTelemetry 1.20: Observability Standard Evolution and Collector

Introduction

OpenTelemetry 1.20, released on November 15, 2023, is most relevant if your on-call needs clearer signals and faster root cause loops. You typically feel the difference during incidents: faster queries, better signal-to-noise in alerts, and more actionable context when tracing issues across services.

SDK Improvements

• Performance optimizations reduce overhead for instrumented applications.
• API stability improvements provide more consistent developer experience.
• Language support expands coverage for additional programming languages.
• Instrumentation libraries provide automatic instrumentation for common frameworks.

Collector Enhancements

1. Performance improvements reduce resource usage and improve throughput.
2. Processors expansion adds more data transformation and processing capabilities.
3. Exporters enhancements expand support for additional observability backends.
4. Configuration improvements simplify collector setup and management.

Kubernetes Integration

• Operator improvements simplify OpenTelemetry installation and management.
• Auto-instrumentation enables automatic instrumentation of Kubernetes workloads.
• Service discovery enhancements automatically discover and instrument services.
• Resource management provides better resource allocation and limits.

Observability Features

• Metrics collection provides comprehensive application and infrastructure metrics.
• Tracing support enables distributed tracing across microservices.
• Logging integration enables log collection and correlation with traces and metrics.
• Correlation capabilities enable linking traces, metrics, and logs.

Getting Started

helm repo add open-telemetry https://open-telemetry.github.io/opentelemetry-helm-charts
helm install opentelemetry-collector open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector

Configure auto-instrumentation:

apiVersion: opentelemetry.io/v1alpha1
kind: Instrumentation
metadata:
  name: my-instrumentation
spec:
  propagators:
  - tracecontext
  - baggage
  sampler:
    type: parentbased_traceidratio
    argument: "1"

Summary

OpenTelemetry 1.20 provides teams with powerful observability capabilities for understanding application behavior across distributed systems.