Lightstep Creates New AWS Lambda Extension for Monitoring Serverless, Contributes it to the OpenTelemetry Community

Lightstep, a leading Observability tool for understanding microservices and serverless architectures, contributed a brand new AWS Lambda Extension to the OpenTelemetry project. This will provide DevOps teams a quick and vendor-neutral way to collect, ingest, and ultimately understand high-quality serverless data.

According to a recent survey from the CNCF, which draws upon the global cloud-native community, OpenTelemetry is currently the most highly evaluated CNCF sandbox project, and the second most active project behind only Kubernetes. “The idea behind OpenTelemetry is to create an open standard for collecting and pipelining observability data,” said Ted Young, Co-Founder of OpenTelemetry. “Traditional monitoring tools that enforce users to install proprietary agents will soon be a thing of the past.”

Previously, the challenge of monitoring serverless functions was the inability to capture accurate tracing information before the function was shut down, given their highly ephemeral and dynamic nature. According to the recent State of Serverless Report, the median AWS Lambda function only runs for 800 milliseconds. By running a properly configured OpenTelemetry Collector as a Lambda extension, users braid observability into the fabric of their serverless runtime, which keeps telemetry data flowing even as serverless functions are frozen and rescheduled.

“OpenTelemetry will become the defacto open standard for collecting telemetry data,” said Daniel “Spoons” Spoonhower, Co-Founder and CTO of Lightstep. “Serverless functions like AWS Lambda add a level of abstraction and agility that are an important component of modern architectures — this is why we’ve contributed the AWS Lambda Extension to the OpenTelemetry project for anyone to use.”