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  * Industry collaboration at the heart of open standards

 1. Blog
 2. 2025
 3. Go Compile-Time Instrumentation

Alibaba, Datadog, and Quesma Join Forces on Go Compile-Time
Instrumentation

By OpenTelemetry Governance Committee | Friday, January 24, 2025

Standards are only useful if they're widely adopted, and adoption is
only effective if the available tooling facilitates it. I imagine SI
units would not have been too popular when they were introduced if
you had to build your own scales to weigh things in Kilograms!

If you use OpenTelemetry in Go, you'll be familiar with the
challenges of configuring instrumentation libraries to automatically
generate telemetry from well-known open source components. Due to the
compiled nature of the language, you currently have two options^1:

  * Use a separate binary that analyzes your Go process and attaches
    eBPF programs to hooks in your application -- see
    opentelemetry-go-instrumentation.
  * Manually configure instrumentation libraries in your code, for
    example see Instrument the HTTP server.

For different reasons, it is possible that none of those options is
viable, or optimal, in your environment. However, things are about to
change!

Industry collaboration at the heart of open standards 

Over the past few months, OpenTelemetry has received not one, but two
donation proposals from industry leaders to provide a solution to the
problem described above, and enable the use of zero-code,
vendor-neutral, compile-time instrumentation in Go applications.
These are:

  * Alibaba's donation proposal of
    opentelemetry-go-auto-instrumentation
  * Datadog's donation proposal of Orchestrion

We are very grateful to Alibaba and Datadog for these donation
proposals. This continues to demonstrate the convergence of the wider
industry towards the standards defined by OpenTelemetry.

Compile-time instrumentation leverages the standard Go toolchain's
-toolexec mechanism to re-write Go source code before it is passed to
the Go compiler, adding instrumentation in all relevant places
(including dependencies as well as the Go standard library).

The most exciting part of this announcement is that it won't be
Alibaba's or Datadog's solution that "wins". In the true spirit of
open source collaboration, these two organizations have decided to
join forces and commit the necessary resources to bootstrap a new Go
Compile-Time Instrumentation SIG, with the intention of providing a
unified, vendor-neutral approach that picks the best aspects of each
solution and benefits the community as a whole. They will be
supported with further contributions from Quesma, bringing in
experience on instrgen, OpenTelemetry's initial experimental approach
to provide Go compile-time instrumentation based on -toolexec and
which will be superseded as part of the initial efforts of this SIG.

In the longer term, this SIG will focus on:

  * Developing compiler plugins or enhancements that inject
    instrumentation code automatically, ensuring minimal runtime
    performance overhead and compatibility with existing Go projects.
  * Providing standardized instrumentation patterns aligned with
    OpenTelemetry and other monitoring frameworks.

If you are interested in contributing, or you simply want to find out
more, here's some useful information about the SIG:

  * GitHub repository: opentelemetry-go-compile-instrumentation
  * CNCF Slack: #otel-go-compt-instr-sig
  * Meetings: Every other Thursday UTC: 08:00 - 09:00 (subscribe to
    this Google Group for calendar invites, or read more about our
    community calendar)

We look forward to seeing this new SIG in operation, and cannot wait
for the fruits of this awesome collaboration!

---------------------------------------------------------------------

 1. Unless you want to "build your own scales", or the OTel
    equivalent, which is manually instrumenting third-party
    libraries. -[?]

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Last modified January 24, 2025: Add blog post on Go Compile-Time
Instrumentation SIG (#5956) (42cacdab)

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