Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023.  Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

More Organizations Adopt OpenTelemetry

By Tucker Callaway, CEO, Mezmo

In today's distributed, cloud-based environments, capturing and exporting observability data is a complex process for developers and site reliability engineers (SREs). It involves multiple disparate tools that don't integrate well and provide poor visibility into the health and performance of their applications.

In 2023, more organizations will adopt OpenTelemetry to overcome their observability data challenges. OpenTelemetry, one of the most active projects from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), is an open-source, vendor-agnostic set of APIs, software development kits (SDKs), and other tools for collecting and exporting observability data (logs, metrics, traces) from cloud-native applications and infrastructure.

OpenTelemetry Will Bring Greater Value to Observability Pipelines

Organizations depend on data to power various operations. However, in today's digital economy, they are inundated with data and looking for ways to both control and extract more value from it. Data is of little use if it's hard to ingest, transform, and interpret. It needs to flow seamlessly across all business units to drive success. In a recent Harris Poll survey, developers and security engineers reported adding a median of two new data sources, and SREs saw a median of three in the last 12 months. Today, users are sending telemetry data to typically three observability platforms or tools. All three roles in the survey agreed that ease of integration is critical to control the data and make data usable. OpenTelemetry is a step toward that direction.

Forward-thinking organizations are building telemetry pipelines to quickly and efficiently move data. Telemetry pipelines centralize observability data from multiple sources, transform it, enrich it, and send it to various teams in whichever format they need to drive crucial decisions. They provide an efficient means of moving, processing, and delivering data that might otherwise sit isolated in one hard-to-access location.

In addition to helping data to move smoothly across the organization, pipelines help to reduce the costs of increasing data. Storing data is expensive, and the ability to analyze it in motion using an observability pipeline minimizes the amount of data that businesses need to keep in high-cost platforms. In what is expected to be a challenging economic environment in the coming year, owning and determining the right platform and storage destinations will drive cost savings.

While telemetry pipelines help organizations make faster and more accurate decisions at a lower cost, many observability platforms, unfortunately, lock data in and prevent access to the broader organization. OpenTelemetry is essential in determining the agility and responsiveness of digital organizations. By providing an open standard, OpenTelemetry eliminates vendor lock-in and enables the free movement of data to the right people, at the right time, with the right context. This open standard also encourages contributions from the community, accelerating innovation and bringing new capabilities that enhance OpenTelemetry's value.

Another recent survey of data practitioners revealed that 58% have either standardized on or are evaluating OpenTelemetry in their organizations. In that same survey, respondents cited the top reasons they had trouble getting value from their observability data. They reported that extracting metrics from logs is difficult due to a lack of infrastructure, that their data is often incorrect or unusable, that their data is missing important contextual elements, that some teams aren't able to access data, and that they're generating more data than they can afford to send to their observability tools.

In the coming year, organizations will become even more data-centric. The sooner they implement observability pipelines, the sooner they'll be able to efficiently analyze growing volumes of data to make accurate decisions. And as organizations leverage OpenTelemetry to extract greater value from their data and make it more actionable, we can expect similar moves from telemetry pipelines and platform providers. More of them will support OpenTelemery to simplify data ingestion and enrichment.

##

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tucker Callaway is the CEO of Mezmo. He has more than 20 years of experience in enterprise software, with an emphasis on developer and DevOps tools. He is responsible for driving Mezmo's growth across all revenue streams and creating the foundation for future revenue streams and go-to-market strategies. He joined Mezmo in January 2020 as president and CRO and took the torch as CEO six months later. Prior to Mezmo, he served as CRO of Sauce Labs and vice president of worldwide sales at Chef.