The Go OpenTelemetry implementation.

OpenTelemetry's goal is to provide a single set of APIs to capture distributed traces and metrics from your application and send them to an observability platform. This project allows you to do just that for applications written in Go. There are two steps to this process: instrument your application, and configure an exporter.

To start capturing distributed traces and metric events from your application it first needs to be instrumented. The easiest way to do this is by using an instrumentation library for your code. Be sure to check out the officially supported instrumentation libraries.

If you need to extend the telemetry an instrumentation library provides or want to build your own instrumentation for your application directly you will need to use the go.opentelemetry.io/otel/api package. The included examples are a good way to see some practical uses of this process.

Now that your application is instrumented to collect telemetry, it needs an export pipeline to send that telemetry to an observability platform.

You can find officially supported exporters here and in the companion contrib repository. Additionally, there are many vendor specific or 3rd party exporters for OpenTelemetry. These exporters are broken down by trace and metric support.

Project boards and milestones can be found at the respective links. We try to keep these accurate and should be the best place to go for answers on project status.

See the contributing documentation.