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.
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Early Debugging Frustrations
Morgan McLean's early frustration with debugging large-scale systems at Microsoft fueled his interest in observability.
This led him to work on such tools at Google and later co-found OpenTelemetry.
insights INSIGHT
Shift to VMs and Containers
The shift from Platform as a Service (PaaS) to VMs and containers created a need for standardized data extraction.
This challenge led to the creation of OpenTelemetry, merging OpenTracing and OpenCensus.
insights INSIGHT
Challenges of Multiple Signals
OpenTelemetry faces the challenge of supporting various signals like tracing, logging, metrics, and profiling.
Each signal presents unique complexities for documentation and management.
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Spanning thirty years, 'Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow' by Gabrielle Zevin is a sweeping narrative that explores the lives of Sam and Sadie, two friends united by their love of video games. From their childhood encounters to their adulthood as successful game developers, the book delves into themes of identity, creativity, disability, and the redemptive possibilities in play. It is a coming-of-age story that examines the multifaceted nature of human relationships and the need to connect, love, and be loved. The novel is praised for its mature and nuanced portrayal of characters and its ability to engage readers even without prior knowledge of the video game industry.
Morgan McLean, co-founder of OpenTelemetry and senior director of product management at Splunk, has long tackled the challenges of observability in large-scale systems. In a conversation with Alex Williams onThe New Stack Makers, McLean reflected on his early frustrations debugging high-scale services and the need for better observability tools.
OpenTelemetry, formed in 2019 from OpenTracing and OpenCensus, has since become a key part of modern observability strategies. As a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) incubating project, it’s the second most active open source project after Kubernetes, with over 1,200 developers contributing monthly. McLean highlighted OpenTelemetry’s role in solving scaling challenges, particularly in Kubernetes environments, by standardizing distributed tracing, application metrics, and data extraction.
Looking ahead, profiling is set to become the fourth major observability signal alongside logs, tracing, and metrics, with general availability expected in 2025. McLean emphasized ongoing improvements, including automation and ease of adoption, predicting even faster OpenTelemetry adoption as friction points are resolved.
Learn more from The New Stack about the latest trends in Open Telemetry:
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