opentelemetry-go/README.md

# OpenTelemetry-Go

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OpenTelemetry-Go is the [Go](https://golang.org/) implementation of [OpenTelemetry](https://opentelemetry.io/).
It provides a set of APIs to directly measure performance and behavior of your software and send this data to observability platforms.

## Project Status

| Signal  | Status     | Project |
| ------- | ---------- | ------- |
| Traces  | Stable     | N/A     |
| Metrics | Alpha      | N/A     |
| Logs    | Frozen [1] | N/A     |

- [1]: The Logs signal development is halted for this project while we develop both Traces and Metrics.
   No Logs Pull Requests are currently being accepted.

Progress and status specific to this repository is tracked in our local
[project boards](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go/projects)
and
[milestones](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go/milestones).

Project versioning information and stability guarantees can be found in the
[versioning documentation](./VERSIONING.md).

### Compatibility

OpenTelemetry-Go attempts to track the current supported versions of the
[Go language](https://golang.org/doc/devel/release#policy). The release
schedule after a new minor version of go is as follows:

- The first release or one month, which ever is sooner, will add build steps for the new go version.
- The first release after three months will remove support for the oldest go version.

This project is tested on the following systems.

| OS      | Go Version | Architecture |
| ------- | ---------- | ------------ |
| Ubuntu  | 1.19       | amd64        |
| Ubuntu  | 1.18       | amd64        |
| Ubuntu  | 1.17       | amd64        |
| Ubuntu  | 1.19       | 386          |
| Ubuntu  | 1.18       | 386          |
| Ubuntu  | 1.17       | 386          |
| MacOS   | 1.19       | amd64        |
| MacOS   | 1.18       | amd64        |
| MacOS   | 1.17       | amd64        |
| Windows | 1.19       | amd64        |
| Windows | 1.18       | amd64        |
| Windows | 1.17       | amd64        |
| Windows | 1.19       | 386          |
| Windows | 1.18       | 386          |
| Windows | 1.17       | 386          |

While this project should work for other systems, no compatibility guarantees
are made for those systems currently.

## Getting Started

You can find a getting started guide on [opentelemetry.io](https://opentelemetry.io/docs/go/getting-started/).

OpenTelemetry's goal is to provide a single set of APIs to capture distributed
traces and metrics from your application and send them to an observability
platform. This project allows you to do just that for applications written in
Go. There are two steps to this process: instrument your application, and
configure an exporter.

### Instrumentation

To start capturing distributed traces and metric events from your application
it first needs to be instrumented. The easiest way to do this is by using an
instrumentation library for your code. Be sure to check out [the officially
supported instrumentation
libraries](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go-contrib/tree/main/instrumentation).

If you need to extend the telemetry an instrumentation library provides or want
to build your own instrumentation for your application directly you will need
to use the
[Go otel](https://pkg.go.dev/go.opentelemetry.io/otel)
package. The included [examples](./example/) are a good way to see some
practical uses of this process.

### Export

Now that your application is instrumented to collect telemetry, it needs an
export pipeline to send that telemetry to an observability platform.

All officially supported exporters for the OpenTelemetry project are contained in the [exporters directory](./exporters).

| Exporter                              | Metrics | Traces |
| :-----------------------------------: | :-----: | :----: |
| [Jaeger](./exporters/jaeger/)         |         | ✓      |
| [OTLP](./exporters/otlp/)             | ✓       | ✓      |
| [Prometheus](./exporters/prometheus/) | ✓       |        |
| [stdout](./exporters/stdout/)         | ✓       | ✓      |
| [Zipkin](./exporters/zipkin/)         |         | ✓      |

## Contributing

See the [contributing documentation](CONTRIBUTING.md).