The New Stack Podcast OpenTelemetry: What’s New with the 2nd Biggest CNCF Project?
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
