The OpenTelemetry project was announced in 2019 as the coming together of two efforts that existed prior to that — OpenTracing and OpenCensus, with the goal of becoming a single open standard for extracting telemetry from distributed microservice-based applications. The project is a collection of specifications, tools, and libraries intended to help collect telemetry from applications in the form of logs, metrics, and traces, which can then be forwarded to any observability tool that supports aggregating, visualizing, and introspecting this data.
In this post, we will explore a new use-case that makes use of OpenTelemetry (abbreviated as OTel), specifically distributed context propagation that is enabled by OTel, in order to create lightweight environments called sandboxes that can then be used to enable various forms of microservice testing in a scalable fashion. We will also look at what kinds of applications this model works most naturally with and how it can help get high-quality testing feedback early in the development lifecycle.