OpenTelemetry-Go

OpenTelemetry-Go is the Go implementation of OpenTelemetry. 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 and milestones.

Project versioning information and stability guarantees can be found in the versioning documentation.

Compatibility

OpenTelemetry-Go attempts to track the current supported versions of the Go language. 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	1.18	amd64
Ubuntu	1.17	amd64
Ubuntu	1.16	amd64
Ubuntu	1.18	386
Ubuntu	1.17	386
Ubuntu	1.16	386
MacOS	1.18	amd64
MacOS	1.17	amd64
MacOS	1.16	amd64
Windows	1.18	amd64
Windows	1.17	amd64
Windows	1.16	amd64
Windows	1.18	386
Windows	1.17	386
Windows	1.16	386

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

Go 1.18 was added in March of 2022. Go 1.16 will be removed around June 2022.

Getting Started

You can find a getting started guide on opentelemetry.io.

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.

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.opentelemetry.io/otel/api package. The included examples 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.

Exporter	Metrics	Traces
Jaeger		✓
OTLP	✓	✓
Prometheus	✓
stdout	✓	✓
Zipkin		✓

Contributing

See the contributing documentation.