opentelemetry-1-55-0

name	opentelemetry-1-55-0
description	Complete OpenTelemetry 1.55.0 specification toolkit for implementing distributed tracing, metrics collection, and logging across polyglot applications. Use when instrumenting services with OTel SDKs, configuring OTLP exporters, implementing sampling strategies, setting up context propagation, or building observability pipelines following the official OTel 1.55.0 spec.
license	MIT
author	Tangled <[e-mail]>
version	0.1.0
tags	["distributed-tracing","metrics","logging","observability","OTLP","context-propagation","sampling","semantic-conventions"]
category	observability
external_references	["https://opentelemetry.io/","https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector","https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-proto","https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification","https://github.com/open-telemetry/semantic-conventions","https://opentelemetry.io/docs/","https://www.w3.org/TR/baggage/","https://www.w3.org/TR/trace-context/","https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/overview/"]

OpenTelemetry 1.55.0

Overview

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a vendor-neutral, open-source observability framework for instrumenting, generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry data — traces, metrics, logs, and profiles. It is a CNCF project supported by 90+ observability vendors and provides a unified standard across the industry.

At the highest architectural level, OpenTelemetry clients are organized into signals. Each signal provides a specialized form of observability and functions independently while sharing common subsystems like context propagation. OpenTelemetry is a cross-cutting concern — instrumentation code is mixed into application code to describe behavior without modifying business logic.

Each signal consists of four types of packages:

• API — Cross-cutting public interfaces for instrumentation. Imported by third-party libraries and application code.
• SDK — The implementation of the API, managed by the application owner. Includes constructors and plugin interfaces.
• Semantic Conventions — Standardized keys and values describing commonly observed concepts, protocols, and operations.
• Contrib — Optional plugins and instrumentation maintained by the OpenTelemetry project (API Contrib depends only on API; SDK Contrib also depends on SDK).

Required plugins like OTLP Exporters and TraceContext Propagators are included as part of the SDK.

When to Use

• Instrumenting applications with distributed tracing, metrics, or logs following the official spec
• Configuring OTLP exporters with environment variables for endpoint, headers, TLS/mTLS
• Implementing sampling strategies (AlwaysOn, AlwaysOff, TraceIdRatioBased, ProbabilitySampler, ParentBased)
• Setting up context propagation across service boundaries using W3C TraceContext and Baggage
• Building observability pipelines with the OpenTelemetry Collector
• Applying semantic conventions for attributes, resources, and instrumentation scope
• Designing metrics with Views, aggregations (Sum, Gauge, Histogram, ExponentialHistogram), and exemplars
• Working with the OTLP data model for traces, metrics, logs, and profiles
• Migrating from legacy systems (Zipkin exporter is deprecated as of 1.55.0)

Core Concepts

Signals: The primary observability dimensions — Traces (distributed request flows), Metrics (numerical measurements over time), Logs (structured events), Baggage (propagated name/value pairs), and Profiles (CPU/memory flame graphs).

Context: An immutable propagation mechanism carrying execution-scoped values across API boundaries. All signals share the same Context for in-process state access. Supports explicit and implicit (thread-local/async-local) modes.