AI-powered
podcast player
Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features
The New Stack Podcast
OpenTelemetry: What’s New with the 2nd Biggest CNCF Project?
Feb 6, 2025
Morgan McLean, co-founder of OpenTelemetry and senior director at Splunk, shares insights from his extensive experience in observability for large-scale systems. He discusses the evolution of OpenTelemetry, born from OpenTracing and OpenCensus, and its crucial role in simplifying distributed tracing and application metrics. McLean anticipates that profiling will emerge as a key observability signal by 2025. He also explores the integration of AI with observability and the community's collaborative efforts aimed at improving adoption and standardization across diverse environments.
30:14
Episode guests
AI Summary
AI Chapters
Episode notes
Podcast summary created with Snipd AI
Quick takeaways
- OpenTelemetry emerged to address debugging challenges in large-scale systems, combining tools from OpenTracing and OpenCensus for improved observability.
- The introduction of profiling alongside existing observability signals aims to enhance application performance analysis and streamline issue resolution.
Deep dives
Foundations of OpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry was created in response to the challenges developers faced with debugging large-scale services. Morgan McLean, one of its co-founders, recounts his early career frustrations at companies like Microsoft and Google, where existing tools lacked the capability to effectively diagnose issues during service rollouts. He and others recognized the need for standardized observability tools as the industry shifted towards virtual machines and containers, leading to a collaboration that merged several projects into OpenTelemetry. Since its launch in 2019, OpenTelemetry has become a significant contributor to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, allowing developers to gain critical insights into application performance.
Get the Snipd
podcast app
Unlock the knowledge in podcasts with the podcast player of the future.
AI-powered
Discover
highlights
Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode
Save any
moment
Hear something you like? Tap your headphones to save it with AI-generated key takeaways
Share
& Export
Send highlights to Twitter, WhatsApp or export them to Notion, Readwise & more
AI-powered
podcast player
Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features
Discover
highlights
Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode