\Today, we are launching Dash0 (”Dash Zero”). We are a group of observability and monitoring experts devoted to one mission: Make Observability easy for every developer.
After building Instana and taking a break from startups and observability, we were impressed by how much OpenTelemetry has matured and how central Prometheus has become the de-facto standard for time series in cloud-native.
The good news for the entire software industry is that there now exists a fully adopted foundation across most of the layers of technology used to build modern applications.
Frameworks and platforms adopt OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and other open-source observability standards to provide metrics, logs, and traces. Semantic conventions also standardized the metadata for telemetry data to get important context regarding technologies, protocols, and infrastructures.
Unfortunately, the potential of all this telemetry seems largely untapped. You still need very specialized knowledge to gain insights. The increasing standardization and adoption of semantical metadata opens up new possibilities for better correlating the different signals (logs, metrics, traces, etc.) and simplifying and improving the analysis of issues and their impact on your services and applications.
In the recently published book on observability titled “Practical OpenTelemetry”, Daniel Gomez Blanco describes the opportunities and challenges of constructing a proper ‘observability’ solution with automatic correlation:
Automatic correlation can drastically reduce the time needed to identify the source of anomalies, but it is not magic. It relies on different components sharing the same context to be instrumented following a certain set of semantic conventions that allow for telemetry data to be joined across multiple dimensions. Agreeing on these semantic conventions and then enforcing them across services and teams is something with which organizations have struggled for a long time.
[Gomez Blanco, Daniel. Practical OpenTelemetry (page 33). Apress.]
This is why we started Dash0.
We believe that Observability should be easy: easy to install, easy to integrate, easy to customize, easy to use, and easy to control.
In our work, we will follow these six principles:
- Ease of insight: Correlation and contextualization of issues require going beyond telemetry silos and isolated dashboards.
- Ease of use: Broadly adopting observability beyond expert circles requires a magical user and developer experience and collaboration.
- Ease of integration: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and open standards are the foundation of modern observability.
- Ease of installation: Collecting the right telemetry must be trivial, regardless of your infrastructure or applications.
- Ease of customization: Adopting observability to your needs and getting the right information for your team should be straightforward to configure.
- Ease of cost control: More data does not guarantee more insight. Getting the right balance between data volume and insight must be intuitive.
This is what you can expect from Dash0:
- We will research and publish our ideas on observability done right as blog posts on this website. We will listen more than speak.
- We will eagerly engage with and contribute to the observability community.
- We will publish open-source tools to help developers achieve better observability with OpenTelemetry.
- We may eventually release our observability solution built around our six principles.
In this spirit, today we are announcing OTelBin.io. OTelBin is a visual configuration tool for OpenTelemetry collector configurations. We poured a lot of passion into it, and we hope you will like it.
If you want to learn more about OTelBin, we have another blog post that you may want to read: OTelBin - Visual OpenTelemetry Collector Configuration
OTelBin is a promising start for our journey. We are excited to collaborate with you and the observability community to make cloud-native observability as powerful and easy as possible!
If you want to stay updated and read what we have learned, sign up for our weekly updates or reach out via LinkedIn; let your voice help drive Dash0’s journey.
