O11ycast Ep. #78, Exploring OTTL with Tyler Helmuth and Evan Bradley
Feb 11, 2025
Join Tyler Helmuth, an engineer at Honeycomb, and Evan Bradley, a key maintainer at Dynatrace, as they unpack the innovative OpenTelemetry Transformation Language (OTTL). They delve into OTTL’s powerful telemetry data transformations and its evolution within the OpenTelemetry ecosystem. Discover the practical applications, challenges, and limitations of OTTL, including issues with state management. The conversation also highlights the need for better documentation and emphasizes community involvement as OTTL approaches its beta version.
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Demonstrating OTTL's Arithmetic
- Showcase OTTL's arithmetic capabilities, like calculating span durations.
- Demonstrate how to make transformations based on these calculated durations.
OTTL Statelessness
- OTTL statements are stateless, processing data individually without remembering previous inputs.
- A cache-like structure allows storing data between statements within a single span or log, but this data is not persistent across different data points.
Statefulness Nuances
- Global statefulness causes pain, but local statefulness is useful, similar to Rust's borrow checker.
- OTTL functions don't store input/output information, and variables cannot be referenced across lines.