End-user resources

You don’t have to become a contributor to have influence in OpenTelemetry. Just by showing up with your perspective as an end user, you’re helping shape the future of the project. The OTel maintainers and contributors are deeply invested in building a project that meets real-world needs, and they need your input, regardless if you work in a giant corp, tiny startup, or you are just hacking in your garage.

Different people prefer different ways to share their feedback and learn from each other. Some like to have a conversation, others prefer responding to a survey, and for others, giving a 👍 is enough. We have you covered.

Report an issue or give a thumbs up

If you encounter a bug, unexpected behavior, or a limitation, reporting it is one of the most effective ways to help improve the project.

First, review the OpenTelemetry issues to see if anyone already reported it before you. Giving a thumbs up or sharing more context in a comment is exactly what we’re looking for. Are you the first person who bumped into this problem? File an issue in one of our repositories.

Learn more about how we track reactions to issues.

Chat on Slack

Questions, clarifications, or observations don’t always fit well into issues but are just as important. You can voice them in OpenTelemetry-related channels in CNCF Slack workspace. OTel maintainers, contributors, and other end users hang out there and can answer your questions.

Any channel starting with #otel- is good, but some of the channels you might want to keep an eye on are:

• #opentelemetry
• #otel-semantic-conventions
• #otel-community-demo
• #otel-vendor

Not sure where to ask? Post to #otel-sig-end-user, and we will help you find the right channel.

Join CNCF Slack.

Respond to a survey

Sometimes it’s us who want to ask the questions! Special Interest Groups (SIGs) in OpenTelemetry run surveys to better understand our users’ needs and make better-informed decisions when building OTel. Here are a few examples of surveys we’ve run previously:

• Contributor Experience Survey
• Developer Experience Survey
• Docs Usability Survey

Learn more about how we run surveys.

Join a podcast

The ultimate way to share your experience in our toolbox is joining our podcasts. We regularly do two types of them:

• OTel Me: A discussion between our host and end users about their OpenTelemetry adoption and implementation.
• OTel in Practice: An interactive enablement session on different aspects of OpenTelemetry by contributors and end users.

We do the podcasts live and recordings are posted on the OpenTelemetry YouTube channel. If you want to talk about your experience with OpenTelemetry, let us know.

Learn more about how we do podcasts.

Connect with us

If you’re interested in being a part of any of these programs, have any questions or tips on how to improve end user feedback collection, or just want to say hi, let us know in #otel-sig-end-user in CNCF Slack! Not there yet? Join us!