OpenTelemetry has seen significant growth over the past years and Honeycomb is now working to extend its capabilities for front-end developers. In this episode, Austin Parker, Director of Open Source at Honeycomb, discusses the growth of the OpenTelemetry project, Honeycomb’s upcoming release of their OpenTelemetry Web Wrapper, the expansion of OpenTelemetry’s scope, and the transition from Observability 1.0 to 2.0. He says, “It’s really hard to understate how explosive the growth of OpenTelemetry has been from a few years ago.”

Growth of OpenTelemetry project and how it benefits companies like Honeycomb

• Parker discusses the substantial growth of the OpenTelemetry project that he has observed at KubeCon events since 2019 from around 60 people at a meeting in Detroit to 690 at a recent KubeCon.
• The project has grown significantly, with 2500 unique contributors in the current month alone.
• Parker explains that this growth benefits observability companies like Honeycomb, as users now seek guidance on integrating OpenTelemetry into their existing systems rather than starting from scratch.

Honeycomb’s recent developments and why the scope of OpenTelemetry is expanding

• Parker discusses Honeycomb’s recent developments, particularly their efforts to enhance OpenTelemetry’s capabilities for front-end applications.
• Honeycomb is preparing to release a beta of their OpenTelemetry Web Wrapper, which will provide core web vitals and insights for front-end developers to help them identify and resolve problems affecting user experience.
• Parker attributes the widespread adoption of OpenTelemetry to the collective efforts of many industry contributors highlighting some of the companies who have actively promoted and supported the project.
• The observability market is vast and Parker talks about why OpenTelemetry’s scope is expanding. He explains how the project is broadening its capabilities to include continuous profiling and defining new data types.

The evolution of observability and the differences between Observability 1.0 and Observability 2.0

• Parker discusses the evolution of observability and why people are advocating for a new versioning approach, moving from “Observability 1.0” to “Observability 2.0” He explains the differences between them
• Observability 2.0 focuses on intentional data collection aligned with business outcomes, ensuring that every data point collected is valuable.
• Parker explains how Observability 2.0 allows costs to grow linearly with traffic, rather than exponentially, citing Meta and Microsoft’s mature observability programs.
• Parker highlights the challenge for smaller organizations to balance investment in observability with feature development and innovation.

The potential uses of GenAI in Observability

• Parker discusses the potential uses of generative AI (GenAI) in observability. He highlights Honeycomb’s “query assistant,” which uses Gen AI to translate natural language queries into Honeycomb queries, simplifying data exploration.
• Parker highlights the potential use of large language models (LLMs) in incident response.
• Successful AI integration in observability requires a mature, structured data environment, indicative of an “Observability 2.0” mindset.

Guest: Austin Parker (LinkedIn)
Company: Honeycomb (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.