Over the years, GitHub engineers have developed many ways to observe how our systems behave. We mostly make use of statsd for metrics, the syslog form

Why (and how) GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry | The GitHub Blog

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2021-05-26 19:30:04

Over the years, GitHub engineers have developed many ways to observe how our systems behave. We mostly make use of statsd for metrics, the syslog format for plain text logs and OpenTracing for request traces. While we have somewhat standardized what we emit, we tend to solve the same problems over and over in each new system we develop.

And, while each component serves its individual purpose well, interoperability is a challenge. For example, several pieces of GitHub’s infrastructure use different statsd dialects, which means we have to special-case our telemetry code in different places – a non-trivial amount of work!

Different components can use different vocabularies for similar observability concepts, making investigatory work difficult. For example, there’s quite a bit of complexity around following a GitHub.com request across various telemetry signals, which can include metrics, traces, logs, errors and exceptions. While we emit a lot of telemetry data, it can still be difficult to use in practice.

We needed a solution that would allow us to standardize telemetry usage at GitHub, while making it easy for developers around the organization to instrument their code. The OpenTelemetry project provided us with exactly that!

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