A networking protocol that has been under development for four years got a boost from both F5 Inc. and ServiceNow Inc. this week.

Called OpenTelemetry — OTel or OTLP for short — the protocol has been endorsed by dozens of vendors and has a curious mixture of open- and closed-source code to help advance the cause of observability, as it is now called. If refers to the broad collection of log analyzers, metrics and network traces that are used to figure out what’s happening inside a digital infrastructure.

OTLP was designed to be extensible, efficient and useful in a number of situations. For example, it can help analyze server log collections and share network trace data between different providers’ products. There is more in my story for SiliconANGLE here.