Announcing a New CNCF certification for OpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry (also known as OTel) is an open-source observability framework with tools, libraries, APIs, and SDKs for collecting, processing, and exporting rich telemetry data such as traces, metrics, and logs to backend systems. It’s designed to help developers monitor and evaluate the performance and health of cloud-native applications, which can be distributed across complex infrastructures.
OTel was accepted to CNCF on May 7, 2019 and moved to the Incubating maturity level on August 26, 2021. Since moving to Incubation, OpenTelemetry has become one of CNCF’s most active projects, with high adoption rates across industries. Otel is the 2nd most active CNCF project after Kubernetes.
“Modern cloud native systems can be complex to manage if an organization lacks the necessary telemetry data and visibility into their varied layers,” says Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF. “OpenTelemetry has come a long way to mature open source telemetry technology and specifications to benefit all. Our new OpenTelemetry certification supports our goal of educating and promoting best practices for cloud native observability.”
Benefits of OpenTelemetry
OTel brings a unified, community-supported framework for capturing observability data with these key features and benefits:
- Supports Distributed Tracing: Collects traces to show the journey of a request across various services and components.
- Facilitates Metrics Collection: Gathers data on application and infrastructure performance, allowing users to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) in real time.
- Simplifies Logging: Makes it easier to link logs to traces for faster issue resolution.
- Avoids Vendor Lock-in with Universal, Open Standard: Can export data to any backend that supports it and is compatible across over 40 different observability and monitoring tools. OpenTelemetry provides a vendor-neutral, standardized way of collecting telemetry data.
Why Opentelemetry Matters to Platform Engineers
OpenTelemetry simplifies observability and enables better visibility into the complex, distributed systems of cloud-native and microservices-based applications. Here’s why Otel is so valuable in their role:
- Observability Across Systems: OTel collects and correlates traces, metrics, and logs from across the stack to provide a unified view that makes it easier to diagnose issues, monitor application health, and ensure system reliability across an entire platform.
- Proactive Incident Response and Minimized Downtime: Otel captures distributed traces that map out the flow of requests across microservices, allowing engineers to understand and troubleshoot issues quickly with faster insights to help teams respond to anomalies faster.
- Automated Alerts and Real-Time Data: With Otel, engineers can set up alerts based on real-time performance data, triggering scaling or rollbacks when issues arise – an essential function for large-scale systems
- Improved Developer Experience and Cross-Team Collaboration: Otel allows engineers to offer developers seamless instrumentation options, making it easier to track issues across microservices without custom observability code. This enhances the platform’s reliability, and fosters a collaborative DevOps culture
- Scalability and Flexibility: OpenTelemetry is designed for cloud-native and distributed architectures, so it scales well across clusters and handles the demands of containerized environments.
- Resource Management and Cost Effectiveness: Rich telemetry data gives insight into resource usage patterns, making it easier to optimize infrastructure costs and performance.
By providing a standardized, comprehensive observability solution, OpenTelemetry enables platform engineers to improve reliability, efficiency, and agility, making it an essential tool in building and maintaining modern, cloud-native platforms.
“OpenTelemetry is quickly becoming a ‘must-have’ component of cloud native, and this certification is a great way for developers to demonstrate their mastery. We’re excited to launch this program with CNCF, and anticipate it to be just the first step in learning programs that we build together,” says Austin Parker, OpenTelemetry Governance Committee and Director of Open Source at honeycomb.io
Value of Certification in OTel
OpenTelemetry certification provides valuable benefits, especially for people in cloud-native and observability roles. A certification will validate essential skills in setting up and using OpenTelemetry to monitor distributed systems, covering trace, metric, and log collection, which aids in troubleshooting and optimizing performance. Certification also gives professionals a competitive edge in acquiring or progressing in DevOps, SRE, and Cloud Engineering roles by demonstrating expertise in a critical, widely adopted observability tool. Overall, it’s a solid career investment for advancing in cloud-native practices and enhancing organizational impact.
Announcing the OpenTelemetry Certified Associate (OTCA)
Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Linux Foundation Education are excited to announce the launch of the OpenTelemetry Certified Associate (OTCA) certification. The certification will help Application Engineers, DevOps Engineers, System Reliability Engineers, Platform Engineers or any IT professional interested in building their skills in OpenTelemetry – the industry standard for tracing, metrics and logs increase their ability to leverage telemetry data across distributed systems to solve problems or increase team collaboration.
The primary domains and competencies covered by this certification are:
- Fundamentals of Observability
- The OpenTelemetry API and SDK
- The OpenTelemetry Collector
- Maintaining and Debugging Observability Pipelines
The OTCA certification was built in collaboration with Honeycomb, with the participation of people from Chronosphere, Elastic, Lynxmind, F1rst Digital Services, Sicredi, DBS Bank, Accenture, Datadog and Lightstep