Dynatrace teams with Google and Microsoft on OpenTelemetry

Software intelligence company Dynatrace is collaborating with Google and Microsoft on the OpenTelemetry project to shape the future of open standards-based observability.

To further advance the industry and extend the reach of its Software Intelligence Platform, Dynatrace is contributing transaction tracing know-how and manpower to the project.

OpenTelemetry is focused on providing standardised transaction-level observability through the generation, collection, and description of telemetry data for distributed cloud-native systems.

As OpenTelemetry becomes more widely adopted, it will serve as an additional data source that further extends the breadth of cloud observability, including expanding the broad reach of what the Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform already automatically collects and ingests into Davis, its explainable AI engine.

"Our goal is to ensure 'run the business' software underpinning digital enterprises works perfectly, so we feel it's important to contribute our expertise to this open source project to improve and advance observability in a broader manner," says Dynatrace Innovation Lab head and chief technical strategist Alois Reitbauer.

"The OpenTelemetry initiative will enable developers of cloud-native applications to build standardised observability into their software. As this gains momentum, observability will be increasingly differentiated by what can be done with data, versus simply how much data can be collected. That's why we're excited for the day when OpenTelemetry is widely adopted, as it will increase the breadth of the data and scope of the cloud ecosystem that organisations can observe. As a result, our customers will benefit from richer insights and more actionable answers.

Dynatrace is working with Microsoft, Google and others as a core contributor to OpenTelemetry, providing its technical know-how, manpower, and code to equip the project with enterprise-grade capabilities, including:

• Higher-level instrumentation APIs: offering higher-fidelity tracing code to enable developers to quickly and easily build observability into their cloud-native applications and reduce the monitoring blind-spots as new methodologies and programming languages emerge.
   
• Integration of universal Trace Context: supporting the availability of transactional context across hybrid multi-clouds, ensuring organisations can more easily maintain end-to-end observability across their cloud-native ecosystems.
   
• Runtime management: helping organisations ensure the resources needed to gain observability into the individual components and software libraries underpinning their cloud-native applications are dynamically available.

 "The ultimate goal of OpenTelemetry is to become the default way that developers and operators capture performance information from their services," says Google product manager Morgan McLean.

"We cannot reach that goal without the support of a strong ecosystem. We are thrilled Dynatrace is a core contributor to OpenTelemetry. The broader community will benefit from its nearly 15 years of experience in automated and distributed tracing for enterprises.

Microsoft group programme manager Hong Gao adds, "We had a highly productive collaboration with Dynatrace on the W3C Trace Context standard, and we look forward to working together on advancing OpenTelemetry for developers.