Splunk LLC, a subsidiary of Cisco Systems Inc., today announced enhanced support for OpenTelemetry, an open-source observability framework that provides software tools and application programming interfaces for gathering and processing telemetry data, such as metrics, logs, and traces, used to manage the performance of distributed systems.

Citing its research showing that nearly 60% of organizations rely primarily on OpenTelemetry, Splunk has made the standard the basis of its Observability Cloud. The new enhancements include improved visibility into infrastructure, enhanced capabilities for troubleshooting the Kubernetes orchestrator for software containers, and expanded support for automatic setup of OpenTelemetry instrumentation.

The new Service Inventory feature automatically detects all third-party applications, provides step-by-step recommendations for OpenTelemetry setup, and highlights missing instrumentation to allow for easier identification of infrastructure blind spots.

“It detects most of the applications people want to capture data from, such as databases, message queues and web servers, and it also shows custom applications,” said Morgan McLean (pictured), co-founder of the OpenTelemetry project and senior director of product management at Splunk. “It will apply Open Telemetry language and instrumentation to extract data from them.”

Forgotten applications

The feature is especially useful for what McLean called “the pernicious issue of people forgetting that something exists. Perhaps it couldn’t be automatically configured, and you never got around to it. Our goal is to show people where those holes are so they can proactively fix them.”

Enhanced Kubernetes monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities improved visibility for detecting and resolving issues within Kubernetes clusters.

“There’s a new user interface that allows you to visually explore the Kubernetes cluster, as well as some enhancements coming to our APM [application performance management] product that will display even more data in the context of application performance,” McLean said.

Splunk is also rolling out OpenTelemetry Python 2.0 and Node.js 3.0 to enhance support for cloud-native applications. Integrating with the latest OpenTelemetry versions ensures more uniform and in-depth visibility into microservices, facilitating better troubleshooting.

This release essentially brings OpenTelemetry into sync with the semantics of those languages. “We’re now locked in with the same release cycle,” McLean said.

Cisco has joined Splunk in championing OpenTelemetry by adopting the standard natively in its ThousandEyes platform for monitoring and managing cloud-based environments. ThousandEyes infers correlations between digital experience health and observability metrics.

AppDynamics, a full-stack application performance management and information technology operations analytics platform, also natively supports OpenTelemetry. It provides an OpenTelemetry-compatible backend for ingesting trace data and generating reports.

The new features are now available globally.

Photo: SiliconANGLE