Stanza, an open source log agent developed by observIQ, a provider of an observability platform, has become part of the OpenTelemetry Project for collecting telemetry data.
Mike Kelly, CTO and co-founder, observIQ, said Stanza will make it possible to collect log data alongside other telemetry data using a common application programming interface (API) and software development kit (SDK).
OpenTelemetry is currently a sandbox-level project being developed under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF); it provides a set of open source libraries, agents and other components for collecting the telemetry data consumed by observability and IT monitoring tools.
Contributors to the OpenTelemetry Project include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Elastic, Google, Honeycomb, Lightstep, New Relic and Splunk. After Kubernetes, Kelly said the OpenTelemetry Project is now the most popular open source initiative being advanced by the CNCF.
The OpenTelemetry Project is still a long way from delivering agent software that will be widely employed on an IT production environment. However, the potential implications of the project are already being widely noticed. Rather than having to deploy, manage and update agent software for individual IT management tools, it will soon be possible to deploy a single set of agent software to generate data that can be consumed by multiple platforms.
That shift will enable providers of these platforms to focus more of their effort on enhancing their analytics capabilities rather than developing proprietary agent software that typically doesn’t provide much differentiated value, Kelly said.
Stanza is part of an IT observability platform developed by observIQ when it was previously known as Blue Medora. After selling its platform for integrating monitoring tools to VMware, Blue Medora changed its name to observIQ. Now, it is making an effort to advance adoption of an observability platform that it makes available as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application.
Will DevOps teams roll out elements of OpenTelemetry themselves, or wait for the observability and monitoring tool and platform providers to support open source agents that would automatically be deployed? That remains to be seen. Regardless, the total cost of observability should decline, as open source agent software replaces the proprietary agent software strewn across enterprise IT environments today. The expectation for vendors is that more applications will be consuming analytics data surfaced by the observability and monitoring platforms they provide.
Of course, it will be a while before that dream is fully realized. In the meantime, IT organizations will need to carefully evaluate the total cost of observability against the business value of the application deployed. Cost is one of the reasons application performance management (APM) tools are not widely employed today. Of course, as IT environments become more complex, thanks to the rise of microservices and serverless computing frameworks, it’s also become increasingly apparent that observability will soon be a capability IT teams can’t afford to do without.
