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opentelemetry-go is a free, open source monitoring & observability project written in Go and released under Apache-2.0. It has 6,553 GitHub stars, 1,473 forks and 166 open issues, and was last pushed 11 hours ago. On this registry it ranks #62 of 97 tracked projects in Monitoring & Observability, with 5 head-to-head comparisons available. It gained 1 stars over the last 3 tracked days.

What is opentelemetry-go?

What it is

OpenTelemetry-Go is the Go implementation of OpenTelemetry, the vendor-neutral observability framework. It provides a set of APIs that let Go programs directly measure the performance and behavior of their own software, then send the resulting telemetry to observability platforms. The project lives in the Go ecosystem and is distributed as the module go.opentelemetry.io/otel, published on pkg.go.dev and licensed under Apache-2.0. It is a long-running, actively maintained repository, roughly seven years old, with a large contributor base and a steady release cadence.

The concrete problem it solves is instrumentation lock-in. Rather than wiring an application to one vendor's tracing or metrics agent, a developer instruments once against the OpenTelemetry API and points the resulting data at whichever observability platform is in use. The README states the goal plainly: a single set of APIs to capture distributed traces and metrics from an application and send them to an observability platform. This repository delivers that for applications written in Go, covering the three signals of traces, metrics, and logs under one API surface.

Key capabilities

  • Distributed tracing instrumentation for Go applications, at Stable status.
  • Metrics instrumentation for Go applications, at Stable status.
  • Logs support, currently at Release Candidate status rather than Stable.
  • A single API set for capturing traces and metrics, decoupled from any specific observability backend.
  • Compatibility guarantees tied to the currently supported Go releases, with a defined policy for dropping archived Go versions.
  • Tested support for Ubuntu, macOS, and Windows across amd64, 386, and arm64 architectures.
  • Continuous integration, code coverage, Go Report Card, OpenSSF Scorecard, OpenSSF Best Practices, and OSS-Fuzz fuzzing badges published in the README.

Who uses it and how

  • Go service authors instrument application code against the OpenTelemetry API and export traces and metrics to an observability platform of their choosing.
  • Teams standardizing telemetry across polyglot estates use the Go SDK alongside other language implementations of the same specification.
  • Operators running Go workloads on Ubuntu, macOS, or Windows on amd64, 386, or arm64 can rely on tested compatibility for those combinations.
  • Projects that need log signal support can adopt it at Release Candidate status while traces and metrics remain on the Stable track.
  • Contributors and integrators follow project boards and milestones to track per-repository progress and stability guarantees.

Getting started

The README points to a getting started guide hosted at opentelemetry.io under the Go language section. Installation is through the Go module go.opentelemetry.io/otel, and instrumentation proceeds in two steps as described in the README.

When to use it — and when not

project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline

OpenTelemetry-Go

ci codecov.io PkgGoDev Go Report Card OpenSSF Scorecard OpenSSF Best Practices Fuzzing Status FOSSA Status Slack

OpenTelemetry-Go is the Go implementation of OpenTelemetry. It provides a set of APIs to directly measure performance and behavior of your software and send this data to observability platforms.

Project Status

Signal Status
Traces Stable
Metrics Stable
Logs Release Candidate^1

Progress and status specific to this repository is tracked in our project boards and milestones.

Project versioning information and stability guarantees can be found in the versioning documentation.

Compatibility

OpenTelemetry-Go ensures compatibility with the current supported versions of the Go language:

Each major Go release is supported until there are two newer major releases. For example, Go 1.5 was supported until the Go 1.7 release, and Go 1.6 was supported until the Go 1.8 release.

For versions of Go that are no longer supported upstream, opentelemetry-go will stop ensuring compatibility with these versions in the following manner:

  • A minor release of opentelemetry-go will be made to add support for the new supported release of Go.
  • The following minor release of opentelemetry-go will remove compatibility testing for the oldest (now archived upstream) version of Go. This, and future, releases of opentelemetry-go may include features only supported by the currently supported versions of Go.

Currently, this project supports the following environments.

OS Go Version Architecture
Ubuntu 1.27 amd64
Ubuntu 1.26 amd64
Ubuntu 1.27 386
Ubuntu 1.26 386
Ubuntu 1.27 arm64
Ubuntu 1.26 arm64
macOS 1.27 amd64
macOS 1.26 amd64
macOS 1.27 arm64
macOS 1.26 arm64
Windows 1.27 amd64
Windows 1.26 amd64
Windows 1.27 386
Windows 1.26 386

While this project should work for other systems, no compatibility guarantees are made for those systems currently.

Getting Started

You can find a getting started guide on opentelemetry.io.

OpenTelemetry's goal is to provide a single set of APIs to capture distributed traces and metrics from your application and send them to an observability platform. This project allows you to do just that for applications written in Go. There are two steps to this process: instrument your application, and configure an exporter.

Instrumentation

To start capturing distributed traces and metric events from your application it first needs to be instrumented. The easiest way to do this is by using an instrumentation library for your code. Be sure to check out the officially supported instrumentation libraries.

If you need to extend the telemetry an instrumentation library provides or want to build your own instrumentation for your application directly you will need to use the Go otel package. The examples are a good way to see some practical uses of this process.

Export

Now that your application is instrumented to collect telemetry, it needs an export pipeline to send that telemetry to an observability platform.

All officially supported exporters for the OpenTelemetry project are contained in the exporters directory.

Exporter Logs Metrics Traces
OTLP ✓ ✓ ✓
Prometheus ✓
stdout ✓ ✓ ✓
Zipkin ✓

Contributing

See the contributing documentation.

Emeritus

For more information about the emeritus role, see the community repository.

Frequently asked questions

Is opentelemetry-go free to use?

opentelemetry-go is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does opentelemetry-go do?

OpenTelemetry Go API and SDK

What is opentelemetry-go written in?

opentelemetry-go is primarily written in Go. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go, and it has 6,553 GitHub stars.