OpenMetrics project accepted into CNCF Sandbox

For the past several months, engineers from Google Cloud, Prometheus, and other vendors have been aligning on OpenMetrics, a specification for metrics exposition. Today, the project was formally announced and accepted into the CNCF Sandbox, and we’re currently working on ways to support OpenMetrics in OpenCensus, a set of uniform tracing and stats libraries that work with multiple vendors’ services. This multi-vendor approach works to put architectural choices in the hands of developers.

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OpenMetrics stems from the stats formats used inside of Prometheus and Google’s Monarch time-series infrastructure, which underpins both Stackdriver and internal monitoring applications. As such, it is designed to be immediately familiar to developers and capable of operating at extreme scale. With additional contributions and review from AppOptics, Cortex, Datadog, InfluxData, Sysdig, and Uber, OpenMetrics has begun the cross-industry collaboration necessary to drive adoption of a new specification.

OpenCensus provides automatic instrumentation, APIs, and exporters for stats and distributed traces across C++, Java, Go, Node.js, Python, PHP, Ruby, and .Net. Each OpenCensus library allows developers to automatically capture distributed traces and key RPC-related statistics from their applications, add custom data, and export telemetry to their back-end of choice. Google has been a key collaborator in defining the OpenMetrics specification, and we’re now focusing on how to best implement this inside of OpenCensus.

“Google has a history of innovation in the metric monitoring space, from its early success with Borgmon, which has been continued in Monarch and Stackdriver. OpenMetrics embodies our understanding of what users need for simple, reliable and scalable monitoring, and shows our commitment to offering standards-based solutions,” said Sumeer Bhola, Lead Engineer on Monarch and Stackdriver at Google.

For more information about OpenMetrics, please visit openmetrics.io. For more information about OpenCensus and how you can quickly enable trace and metrics collection from your application, please visit opencensus.io.

By Morgan McLean, Product Manager for OpenCensus and Stackdriver APM