Many IT professionals think of open-source software (OSS) as primarily used in startups and enterprises relying on Linux. Early in my career, I worked on IBM mainframes and VAX minicomputers, so I was aware of UNIX and its accompanying stack of products. Mid-career, I worked almost entirely within the Microsoft stack. It was only when I wrote SQL in a Nutshell in the 1990s, which includes coverage of MySQL and PostgreSQL, that I came to realize a multitude of enterprises, great and small, not only use OSS internally but also actively contribute to OSS projects. If you’re an OSS fan, I’m happy to tell you SolarWinds is one such company.
The open-source community is organized around projects, often arranged by non-profit foundations such as
the Apache Foundation and
Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
Best known for our observability and monitoring products, it’s natural for SolarWinds to be proactively engaged with the
OpenTelemetry (OTel) community, a bedrock technology in the observability domain. We’d like to take this opportunity to highlight our participation in the OSS community.
SolarWinds and the OTel Community
OTel is an open-source project under CNCF, which provides a unified framework for generating, collecting, and transmitting telemetry data, such as traces, metrics, and logs. OTel aims to make observability easier and more consistent across different systems and services by offering vendor-neutral APIs, software development kits (SDKs), and tools. OTel has found favor with a wide range of observability vendors and integrates with many libraries and frameworks, making it a versatile, consistent choice for monitoring and analyzing the performance of software and hardware.
Here are a few contribution highlights worth calling out:
- SolarWinds ranked 28 out of 331 companies contributing to the OTel community last quarter.
- The Observability Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Instrumentation team regularly contributes to upstream OTel repositories.
- Our engineers, recognized for their contributions and engagements, have taken up key roles within the community, including Tammy Baylis as an official approver of the OTel Python repository and Xuan Cao as an official approver of the OTel Ruby repository.
SolarWinds Observability Platform Uses OTel
SolarWinds not only contributes to the OTel project but also leverages OTel for key features in the
SolarWinds® Observability platform:
- OpenTelemetry Collector for Host monitoring
- OpenTelemetry Collector and Network Collector for Kubernetes monitoring
- OpenTelemetry APM instrumentation libraries for APM
- SolarWinds Observability APM libraries (based on OTel), managed openly under the Apache 2.0 license
“We started our journey by creating the new SolarWinds Observability APM Instrumentation libraries as custom distributions of OTel in which we adopted OTel as the foundational codebase, then added specific features as needed,” says
Lin Lin, Senior Manager of Software Engineering at SolarWinds. “Then, as we gained familiarity with OTel and found gaps in what we needed, we started contributing to the upstream projects. There are many upstream projects under OTel, for example, one per language SDK. Today, several members on the team are now OTel approvers.”
Get Directly Involved With OSS
One aspect I really love about the OSS community is it’s a welcoming space where it’s easy to get involved, both as a contributor and as a user.
OTel welcomes anyone in the IT community to use, improve, and enjoy it. Non-IT professionals are also welcome to assist with documentation, translation, and promotion. Find out more at
https://opentelemetry.io/community/#develop-and-contribute.
On the other hand, if you’re thinking, “I bet OTel has loads of capabilities I could take advantage of,” check out their GIT repository at
https://github.com/open-telemetry.
Finally, I invite you to look at our observability tools, which utilize all these open-source innovations. Start at the
SolarWinds Observability platform, then dive deeper into APM, database, infrastructure, and network observability. Cheers!
