Why (and how) GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry

This post details GitHub's adoption of OpenTelemetry to standardize telemetry usage. It highlights the challenges of existing disparate telemetry systems (statsd, syslog, OpenTracing) and introduces OpenTelemetry's OTLP for a common, vendor-neutral format. The post showcases the use of OpenTelemetry SDKs and internal helper libraries for easier instrumentation, including examples of auto-instrumentation for Rails, PG, and ActiveJob. It emphasizes tracing as the main entry point for observability in distributed systems and discusses automatic correlation of signals and the contribution back to the OpenTelemetry project.