At KubeCon Europe, it was announced that Elastic Common Schema (ECS) has been accepted by OpenTelemetry (OTel) as a contribution to the project. The goal is to achieve convergence of ECS and OpenTelemetry’s Semantic Conventions (SemConv) into a single open schema that is maintained by OpenTelemetry. This FAQ details Elastic’s contribution of Elastic Common Schema to OpenTelemetry, how it will help drive the industry to a common schema, and its impact on observability and security.

At Lightstep, we’ve seen many organizations grapple with “cloud-native sticker shock” as they come to understand that these complex systems require sifting through massive amounts of data across architectures and proprietary solutions. In today’s macroeconomic environment, organizations are looking to reduce costs while driving innovation, especially when it comes to cloud-native applications.

Metrics, Logs and Traces are often referred to as The Three Pillars of “Observability“. The term observability has been used in control theory to refer to how the state of a system can be inferred from the system’s external outputs. Applied to IT, observability is how the current state of an application can be assessed based on the data it generates. Applications and the IT components they use provide outputs in the form of metrics, events, logs and traces (MELT).

Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) has now become the de-facto standard for all engineering teams seeking to keep pace with the demands of the modern economy. At Coralogix, we operate some of the most advanced build and deploy pipelines in the world. We’ve baked that knowledge into our platform with a CI/CD Observability feature called Coralogix Tagging.

Refinery, Honeycomb’s tail-based dynamic sampling proxy, often makes sampling feel like magic. This applies especially to dynamic sampling, because it ensures that interesting and unique traffic is kept, while tossing out nearly-identical “boring” traffic. But like any sufficiently advanced technology, it can feel a bit counterintuitive to wield correctly, at first. On Honeycomb’s Customer Architect team, we’re often asked to assist customers with their Refinery clusters.

Observability originated in the field of engineering and has recently gained popularity in the world of software development. Put simply, observability refers to the ability to understand the internal state of a system based on its external outputs. IBM defines it as follows: As systems have become more complex, often including remote elements in cloud-based systems, management of the systems and troubleshooting faults and downtime have also become more complex.

Well howdy there partner, Phillip here with a rootin’ tootin’ OTel update for ya, right on time for Kubecon EU!

Contrary to Betteridge’s Law of Tabloid Headlines, the answer to the question, "does OpenTelemetry in.NET cause performance degradation?" is yes, but context is important. I get this question so often that I thought it was time to get some stats on it. I’ve heard comments like: I can only assume that these are based on previous versions, or things like OpenTracing / OpenCensus (the heritage frameworks that were the feeders for OpenTelemetry).