Top Related Projects
A stats collection and distributed tracing framework
🛑 This library is DEPRECATED!
Quick Overview
OpenTelemetry Go is an open-source observability framework for cloud-native software. It provides a collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces) for analysis in order to understand your software's performance and behavior.
Pros
- Vendor-neutral and open-source, providing flexibility and avoiding vendor lock-in
- Comprehensive support for various backends and integration with popular observability tools
- Consistent API across different languages, making it easier for polyglot development teams
- Active community and continuous development, ensuring up-to-date features and improvements
Cons
- Learning curve for developers new to observability concepts
- Potential overhead in application performance, especially with extensive instrumentation
- Configuration complexity for advanced use cases
- Still evolving, which may lead to occasional breaking changes
Code Examples
- Initializing a tracer:
import (
"go.opentelemetry.io/otel"
"go.opentelemetry.io/otel/sdk/trace"
)
func initTracer() {
tp := trace.NewTracerProvider()
otel.SetTracerProvider(tp)
}
- Creating and ending a span:
import "go.opentelemetry.io/otel/trace"
func doWork() {
ctx := context.Background()
tracer := otel.Tracer("example-tracer")
ctx, span := tracer.Start(ctx, "doWork")
defer span.End()
// Your work here
}
- Adding attributes to a span:
import "go.opentelemetry.io/otel/attribute"
func processOrder(ctx context.Context, orderID string) {
_, span := tracer.Start(ctx, "processOrder")
defer span.End()
span.SetAttributes(
attribute.String("order.id", orderID),
attribute.Int("order.items", 3),
)
// Process order
}
Getting Started
To start using OpenTelemetry Go in your project:
-
Install the necessary packages:
go get go.opentelemetry.io/otel \ go.opentelemetry.io/otel/sdk \ go.opentelemetry.io/otel/trace -
Initialize a tracer provider in your main function:
import ( "go.opentelemetry.io/otel" "go.opentelemetry.io/otel/sdk/trace" ) func main() { tp := trace.NewTracerProvider() defer func() { _ = tp.Shutdown(context.Background()) }() otel.SetTracerProvider(tp) // Your application code } -
Use the tracer to create spans in your code as shown in the examples above.
Competitor Comparisons
A stats collection and distributed tracing framework
Pros of OpenCensus
- More mature and stable, with a longer history of production use
- Simpler API, potentially easier for beginners to adopt
- Better integration with Google Cloud Platform services
Cons of OpenCensus
- Limited to specific language implementations
- Lacks some advanced features present in OpenTelemetry
- Development has slowed as focus shifts to OpenTelemetry
Code Comparison
OpenCensus:
import "go.opencensus.io/trace"
span := trace.NewSpan("my-span")
defer span.End()
OpenTelemetry:
import "go.opentelemetry.io/otel/trace"
ctx, span := tracer.Start(ctx, "my-span")
defer span.End()
OpenCensus uses a simpler API for creating spans, while OpenTelemetry requires a context and tracer. OpenTelemetry's approach provides more flexibility and control over span creation and propagation.
OpenTelemetry is the future of observability, combining the best features of OpenCensus and OpenTracing. It offers a more comprehensive and flexible solution for distributed tracing, metrics, and logging. While OpenCensus remains a solid choice for existing projects, new implementations should consider adopting OpenTelemetry for its broader ecosystem support and ongoing development.
🛑 This library is DEPRECATED!
Pros of jaeger-client-go
- Mature and battle-tested library specifically designed for Jaeger
- Simpler API for basic tracing use cases
- Lightweight with fewer dependencies
Cons of jaeger-client-go
- Limited to Jaeger-specific implementations
- Less flexibility for supporting multiple backends or protocols
- Smaller community and ecosystem compared to OpenTelemetry
Code Comparison
jaeger-client-go:
tracer, closer, err := cfg.NewTracer(
config.Logger(jaeger.StdLogger),
)
defer closer.Close()
span := tracer.StartSpan("operation_name")
defer span.Finish()
opentelemetry-go:
tp := sdktrace.NewTracerProvider(sdktrace.WithSampler(sdktrace.AlwaysSample()))
otel.SetTracerProvider(tp)
tracer := otel.Tracer("tracer_name")
ctx, span := tracer.Start(context.Background(), "operation_name")
defer span.End()
The jaeger-client-go code is more concise for basic tracing, while opentelemetry-go offers more configuration options and flexibility. OpenTelemetry's approach is more standardized and vendor-neutral, allowing for easier integration with various backends and observability tools.
Convert 
designs to code with AI
Introducing Visual Copilot: A new AI model to turn Figma designs to high quality code using your components.
Try Visual CopilotREADME
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 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 | Logs | Metrics | Traces |
|---|---|---|---|
| OTLP | â | â | â |
| Prometheus | â | ||
| stdout | â | â | â |
| Zipkin | â |
Contributing
See the contributing documentation.
Footnotes
Top Related Projects
A stats collection and distributed tracing framework
🛑 This library is DEPRECATED!
Convert designs to code with AI
Introducing Visual Copilot: A new AI model to turn Figma designs to high quality code using your components.
Try Visual Copilot