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by tonyhb 1691 days ago
Yeah, OpenTelemetry was OpenCensus, and before that it was OpenTracing. The go client faces some of the same churn; metrics are in alpha and the API isn't documented, though spans and traces are on more solid ground than the Java client it seems.

It's been a lot of change and I can't wait for things to settle down and for companies to stop trying to get their piece. I feel like everyone (Datadog, NewRelic, Google, etc.) saw Lightstep as a competitor and wanted to get involved with a competing spec, which is how we ended up in this consensus mess.

Still, it's good progress and it's so much better than raw logs. Would recommend.

1 comments

Lightstep was one of the originators of the combined spec -- but yes, the churn has been really painful, and we're sorry for the pre-1.0 pain. Now that the spec is 1.0 and most of the language SIGs have put out 1.0 API/SDK releases for tracing, hopefully that pain will reced.
Do you have an insight on the timeline for stabilizing the metrics and logging specs?
A good place to look at is the milestones on GitHub: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specificatio...

Logging is still experimental in the spec. Metrics API is feature freeze and the protocol is stable, so it's more on language SDKs to stabilize their implementations. This is a focus for several of them right now.