For many organizations, transporting and processing such data efficiently accounts for a significant portion of the cost associated with telemetry pipelines. Standardizing telemetry is especially critical because sufficient observability and AI-driven analysis require a uniform intake of data points from the entire IT stack.
F5 has announced its continued support for Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s OpenTelemetry to help IT teams better analyze their solutions’ performance and behavior. In a development partnership with ServiceNow, F5 has contributed approximately 40,000 lines of code to double the compressibility of the OpenTelemetry Protocol.
This innovation reduces the costs of exporting data from data centers, clouds, and edge locations to a telemetry platform by half, depending on the specific data workload. To put the size of this contribution in perspective, the typical software developer produces between 10,000 and 25,000 lines of code each year and the average open source project comprises around 35,000 lines of code.
“While today’s enterprises are much better suited to capture and analyze data versus their historical counterparts, challenges have persisted around effective transport, centralization, and standardization, which is why F5 has invested in the OpenTelemetry project. By adopting OpenTelemetry across the F5 portfolio—and continuing to participate in leading open source efforts with organizations like ServiceNow—we see limitless use cases to make applications more adaptive to changes in their runtime environment via performance assessment, added efficiencies, and enhanced forensics while keeping customer costs to a minimum,” said Laurent Quérel, Project lead and Distinguished engineer, F5.
Beginning with attempts to further optimize the OpenTelemetry Protocol in the context of Apache Arrow to significantly increase processing speed and reduce bandwidth costs, F5 partnered with ServiceNow Cloud Observability to introduce the OpenTelemetry Arrow Project and reference implementation guidance. Apache Arrow is an open source technology enhancing big data, analytics, and machine learning used to provide standardized representations of structured and semi-structured data in a more actionable, digestible format and promote advanced telemetry capabilities.
