OpenTelemetry mission, vision, and values

Mission — our overall north star as a community

OpenTelemetry’s Mission: to enable effective observability by making high-quality, portable telemetry ubiquitous.

Vision — the world we imagine for OTel end-users

Effective observability is powerful because it enables developers to innovate faster while maintaining high reliability. But effective observability absolutely requires high-quality telemetry – and the performant, consistent instrumentation that makes it possible.

Telemetry in this context is the firehose of raw observational data streaming out of software applications, and while “high-quality telemetry” may be a requirement for excellent observability, it’s still unreasonable and unrealistic to expect developers of application software to add or maintain the necessary instrumentation on their own. That is a massive undertaking, and in practice it’s not “just code” – there is also necessary alignment around protocols and semantic conventions for tags, attributes, and other metadata to consider.

So how do we get high-quality, turnkey telemetry without a massive, unsustainable engineering effort? This is where OpenTelemetry comes in. To achieve our vision, OpenTelemetry sees five key opportunities, listed here:

Telemetry should be easy

With OpenTelemetry we want high-quality telemetry to be easy, especially for end-users. That means that OpenTelemetry should have fast time-to-value, set reasonable defaults yet allow for customization, and pair with excellent documentation and a top-tier overall developer experience.

Telemetry should be universal

Telemetry protocols and conventions should be unified across languages and signal types (tracing, metrics, logging, etc), not divergent or siloed. This means that OpenTelemetry aspires to find technical solutions that work consistently, both locally and globally.

Telemetry should be vendor-neutral

For decades, proprietary drop-in agents from monitoring and observability vendors have been the primary source for useful telemetry from across the application stack. Unfortunately, the lack of common standards or APIs across these agents has led to vendor lock-in for customers, and inhibited innovation by tightly coupling telemetry collection with telemetry storage and analysis. With OpenTelemetry, we strive to provide a level playing field for all observability providers, avoid lock-in to any vendor, and interoperate with other OSS projects in the telemetry and observability ecosystem.

Telemetry should be loosely coupled

OpenTelemetry end-users should be able to pick and choose from the pieces they want without bringing in the rest of the project. To enable this, OpenTelemetry’s software architecture is decoupled wherever possible. As a corollary, this also means that OpenTelemetry does not want to “pick winners” when it comes to particular projects or technologies: where possible, we prefer to give our end-users a choice.

Telemetry should be built-in

Historically, telemetry was something developers integrated manually or via post-compilation agents. OpenTelemetry believes that high-quality telemetry can be built in to the entire software stack – just like comments are today.

While the structure and technical details of OpenTelemetry may change over time, these five key opportunities will remain outstanding until we achieve our mission, and as a project we refer to them to orient – and reorient – as we chart our path.

Engineering values — the principles that guide our contributions

OpenTelemetry’s mission and vision describe where we want to go. OpenTelemetry’s engineering values describe how we want to get there.

OpenTelemetry’s core engineering values are compatibility, stability, resiliency, and performance.

We value compatibility

Given the number of stakeholders and supported platforms, following specifications and enabling interoperability is very important. OpenTelemetry strives to be standards-compliant, vendor-neutral, and consistent across languages and components.

We value stability

As many libraries take dependencies on OpenTelemetry APIs, API stability and backwards compatibility is vital for our end-users. As a corollary, we do not introduce new concepts unless we’re confident they’re needed by a broad subset of OpenTelemetry’s end-users.

We value resilience

In OpenTelemetry we value technical resiliency: the ability to adapt and to continue operating even in the face of resource scarcity or other environmental challenges. OpenTelemetry is designed to work and keep collecting telemetry signals when an application is misbehaving, and OpenTelemetry code is designed to degrade gracefully as needed.

We value performance

OpenTelemetry users should not have to choose between high-quality telemetry and a performant application. High performance is a requirement for OpenTelemetry, and unexpected interference effects in the host application are unacceptable.

Community values — the principles that guide our interactions

The OpenTelemetry project aims to be a welcoming place where new and existing members feel safe to respectfully share their opinions and disagreements. We want to attract a diverse group of people to collaborate with us, which means acknowledging that people come from different backgrounds and cultures.

There might be situations where community members act in a dubious manner. If you have seen or experienced unacceptable behavior or anything that would make our community less welcoming, please speak up! See our code of conduct for more information on how to report unacceptable behavior.

While we want to encourage everyone to express themselves in their own way, there are some behaviors that we encourage you to adopt while interacting with other community members.

Act on behalf of the project

It’s no secret that a good number of maintainers of the project are employed by companies with commercial interests in OpenTelemetry, especially vendors in the observability space. That said, we expect community members to act in the best interests of the project. Each member’s priorities can (and should!) align with those of their employers so that the relationship is beneficial to all parties, but when acting as a maintainer or contributor to the project, community members are expected to wear the project’s hat.

Disclose potential conflicts of interest

Even within the project, people might have different hats: a Collector maintainer might be part of the Governance Committee, a JavaScript maintainer might be part of the Technical Committee, and so on. When the context of your message can be ambiguous, make it clear which hat you are using. For instance, during a GC call, a person who is also a maintainer of the Collector might say: “as a Collector maintainer, I believe that…, while as a GC member, I believe …”

Assume positive intent

We all have different priorities in our daily jobs, and while some of us are employed to work full time on OpenTelemetry, some of us are paid to improve specific parts of the project according to the commercial interests of our employers. When reviewing proposals, documents, or code, take the different perspectives into consideration, but more importantly, assume positive intent: while the proposal might seem skewed towards a specific perspective at first, it’s very likely that the author is open to improving it if different perspectives are provided.

Respectfully disagree

Many decisions are made every day as part of our project. Despite giving our best, not all decisions are the right ones. We encourage ideas and solutions to be proposed and debated until an agreement is reached or until the “disagree and commit” stage is reached. What we cannot tolerate is turning attacks against ideas into attacks against people: in the heat of the moment, it might be tempting to make an ad hominem attack but it’s always wrong. If you have reasons to believe the person you are debating with is not acting in the interest of the project, seek mediation instead of engaging further. While the technical merits of the matter should be resolved within the SIG by the maintainers or, in ultimate cases, by the Technical Committee (TC), non-technical matters should be brought up to the Governance Committee.

Be nice

As evidenced in The Cultural Map by Erin Meyer, people from different cultural backgrounds have different ways of communicating. While we don’t expect you to be an expert in capturing unspoken nuances, we expect that you be nice to other folks and that your communication is clear without requiring the other parties to infer what’s not explicitly written there. This includes being minimally polite while transmitting your thoughts and keeping snarky or inappropriate comments to yourself.