Ecosystem Explorer Project Launched

Table of Contents

This post is a little overdue, but we have officially kicked off the Ecosystem Explorer project. The goal of this project is to create an interactive explorer for the OpenTelemetry ecosystem, making it easier for users to understand the various components and instrumentation available, and to provide a platform that manages and updates the documentation automatically.

The project is still very much in its early days, but we have already made some progress in porting over the POC and doing some re-designs and cleanups along the way. We have been populating the backlog of issues, writing design docs, and I recently had an appearance on the Grafana OpenTelemetry community call where I talked a bit about it (among other things).

We’re making a lot of progress, but we could use more help, especially when it comes to exploring and charting the ecosystem outside of java and the collector. We actually have all kinds of needs:

  • Automation and tooling around the metadata management and documentation generation
  • UI/UX design and development for the explorer itself
  • Research and exploration of the ecosystem to identify components and instrumentation to be added to the explorer
  • Writing design docs and contributing to the overall vision of the project

If you are interested in contributing to the project, or just want to follow along with the progress, here are some resources:

Screenshot of the explorer

We are in the final stretch of populating the Java instrumentation metadata, and then we will switch focus to mapping the extension landscape and building out the UI.

Grab a compass and come join us!