We are announcing the availability of Elastic Distributions of OpenTelemetry (EDOT). These Elastic distributions, currently in tech preview, have been developed to enhance the capabilities of standard OpenTelemetry distributions and improve existing OpenTelemetry support from Elastic.
The Elastic Distributions of OpenTelemetry (EDOT) are composed of OpenTelemetry (OTel) project components, OTel Collector, and language SDKs, which provide users with the necessary capabilities and out-of-the-box configurations, enabling quick and effortless infra and application monitoring.
While OTel components are feature-rich, enhancements through the community can take time. Additionally, support is left up to the community or individual users and organizations. Hence EDOT will bring the following to end users:
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Deliver enhanced features earlier than OTel: By providing features unavailable in the “vanilla” OpenTelemetry components, we can quickly meet customers’ requirements while still providing an OpenTelemetry native and vendor-agnostic instrumentation for their applications. Elastic will continuously upstream these enhanced features.
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Enhanced OTel support - By maintaining Elastic distributions, we can better support customers with enhancements and fixes outside of the OTel release cycles. In addition, Elastic support can troubleshoot issues on the EDOT.
EDOT currently includes the following tech preview components, which will grow over time:
Details and documentation for all EDOT are available in our public OpenTelemetry GitHub repository.
Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry (EDOT) Collector
The EDOT Collector, recently released with the 8.15 release of Elastic Observability enhances Elastic’s existing OTel capabilities. The EDOT Collector can, in addition to service monitoring, forward application logs, infrastructure logs, and metrics using standard OpenTelemetry Collector receivers like file logs and host metrics receivers.
Additionally, users of the Elastic Distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector benefit from container logs automatically enriched with Kubernetes metadata by leveraging the powerful container log parser that Elastic recently contributed. This OpenTelemetry-based enrichment enhances the context and value of the collected logs, providing deeper insights and more effective troubleshooting capabilities.
This new collector distribution ensures that exported data is fully compatible with the Elastic Platform, enhancing the overall observability experience. Elastic also ensures that Elastic-curated UIs can seamlessly handle both the Elastic Common Schema (ECS) and OpenTelemetry formats.
Elastic Distributions for Language SDKs
Elastic's APM agents have capabilities yet to be available in the OTel SDKs. EDOT brings these capabilities into the OTel language SDKs while maintaining seamless integration with Elastic Observability. Elastic will release OTel versions of all its APM agents, and continue to add additional language SDKs mirroring OTel.
Continued support for Native OTel components
EDOT does not preclude users from using native components. Users are still able to use:
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OpenTelemetry Vanilla Language SDKs: use standard OpenTelemetry code instrumentation for many popular programming languages sending OTLP traces to Elastic via APM server.
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Upstream Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector (Contrib or Custom): Send traces using the OpenTelemetry Collector with OTLP receiver and OTLP exporter to Elastic via APM server.
Elastic is committed to contributing EDOT features or components upstream into the OpenTelemetry community, fostering a collaborative environment, and enhancing the overall OpenTelemetry ecosystem.
Extending our commitment to vendor-agnostic data collection
Elastic remains committed to supporting OpenTelemetry by being OTel first and building a vendor-agnostic framework. As OpenTelemetry constantly grows its support of SDKs and components, Elastic will continue to refine and mirror EDOT to OpenTelemetry and push enhancements upstream.
Over the past year, Elastic has been active in OTel through its donation of Elastic Common Schema (ECS), contributions to the native OpenTelemetry Collector and language SDKs, and a recent donation of its Universal Profiling agent to OpenTelemetry.
EDOT builds on our decision to fully adopt and recommend OpenTelemetry as the preferred solution for observing applications. With EDOT, Elastic customers can future-proof their investments and adopt OpenTelemetry, giving them vendor-neutral instrumentation with Elastic enterprise-grade support.
Our vision is that Elastic will work with the OpenTelemetry community to donate features through the standardization processes and contribute the code to implement those in the native OpenTelemetry components. In time, as OTel capabilities advance, and many of the Elastic-exclusive features transition into OpenTelemetry, we look forward to no longer having Elastic Distributions for OpenTelemetry.. In the meantime, we can deliver those capabilities via our OpenTelemetry distributions.