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
Traces	Stable
Metrics	Stable
Logs	Beta1

Progress and status specific to this repository is tracked in our project boards and milestones.

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

Compatibility

OpenTelemetry-Go ensures compatibility with the current supported versions of the Go language:

Each major Go release is supported until there are two newer major releases. For example, Go 1.5 was supported until the Go 1.7 release, and Go 1.6 was supported until the Go 1.8 release.

For versions of Go that are no longer supported upstream, opentelemetry-go will stop ensuring compatibility with these versions in the following manner:

• A minor release of opentelemetry-go will be made to add support for the new supported release of Go.
• The following minor release of opentelemetry-go will remove compatibility testing for the oldest (now archived upstream) version of Go. This, and future, releases of opentelemetry-go may include features only supported by the currently supported versions of Go.

Currently, this project supports the following environments.

OS	Go Version	Architecture
Ubuntu	1.23	amd64
Ubuntu	1.22	amd64
Ubuntu	1.23	386
Ubuntu	1.22	386
Linux	1.23	arm64
Linux	1.22	arm64
macOS 13	1.23	amd64
macOS 13	1.22	amd64
macOS	1.23	arm64
macOS	1.22	arm64
Windows	1.23	amd64
Windows	1.22	amd64
Windows	1.23	386
Windows	1.22	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.

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 otel package. The 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	Logs	Metrics	Traces
OTLP	✓	✓	✓
Prometheus		✓
stdout	✓	✓	✓
Zipkin			✓

Contributing

See the contributing documentation.

---

1. https://github.com/orgs/open-telemetry/projects/43 ↩︎