Announcing Alpha OpenTelemetry access logging support in Envoy

Today we are excited to announce Alpha support for OpenTelemetry access logging in Envoy, which implements access logging based on the OpenTelemetry 0.7.0 Protocol release. The OpenTelemetry project was first announced by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in May of 2019; and merged OpenTracing and OpenCensus into a new, unified standard.

With this announcement, users can now configure Envoy to export OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) access logs in a flexible way, utilizing Envoy’s access logging formatter.

Furthermore, by exporting these logs to an OpenTelemetry Collector, the logs can be processed and exported as other telemetry data formats.

What does Alpha support mean?

Alpha support for OTLP in Envoy signifies that the Envoy and OpenTelemetry codebase have reached a stage where both the contributor and maintainer communities are confident it is stable enough for evaluation by the general public. We hope that by announcing this Alpha release, we can accelerate the process of collecting community feedback and contributions to push for a stable release in the near future (see Envoy extension security and stability posture).

The Alpha release signifies that the extension is functional but has not had substantial production burn time.

The road ahead

In the future, additional OpenTelemetry support will be introduced in Envoy, such as tracing and metrics and semantic conventions, to provide a complete OpenTelemetry Observability experience.