At Mezmo, we see a massive opportunity to reduce Mean Time to Detection (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) by making log data more valuable and actionable. Today, we’re thrilled to announce the release of the Mezmo Exporter for OpenTelemetry- the first step in our continued work with the project to further simplify the ingestion of log data and make that data more actionable with enrichment of key OpenTelemetry attributes. With this improved ability to ingest logs from multiple sources using multiple formats, enrich the logs at ingestion, and ultimately correlate log data on Mezmo, teams can find and act on the data that matters most.- decreasing the time to resolve issues that present risks to their business.

What is OpenTelemetry?

OpenTelemetry is an open-source and Cloud Native Computing Foundation incubating project created from a merger between the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects. OpenTelemetry provides a standard set of vendor-agnostic tools, APIs, and SDKs to export telemetry data (metrics, traces, and logs). The variety of tools is beneficial. Traditionally, telemetry data comes from open source and proprietary solutions in disparate formats. Due to a lack of standardization, users can often see a lack of data portability or the burden of added time to maintain their telemetry data. 

Benefits to Mezmo Users

Reduce Mean Time to Resolution

With the Mezmo Exporter for OpenTelemetry, developers can get the information they need to identify and resolve issues faster within the Mezmo user interface (UI). Instead of forcing developers to search across disparate systems to find all relevant information for troubleshooting, developers can now tag logs ingested via the exporter with any additional attributes such as trace.id, span.id, metadata from your cloud environment, application data, and many others. This feature allows Mezmo’s powerful search capabilities to filter ingested logs by several meaningful attributes, allowing developers to spend less time searching and more time resolving critical issues. 

Centralize Ingestion from Multiple Sources

The introduction of Mezmo’s Exporter for OpenTelemetry makes it possible to ingest logs from multiple sources using a single collector. The data can be enriched at ingestion, making correlating logs across many different services on Mezmo a simple search command. Whether you are ingesting application logs, Kubernetes logs, syslogs, or Windows Event Logs, OpenTelemetry makes it possible to collect these disparate log types and ingest them to the Mezmo platform, unlocking the power of their observability data. Existing OpenTelemetry users no longer need to do any additional work to export their observability data into Mezmo’s log analysis platform. To export OpenTelemetry data into Mezmo, users need to install the OpenTelemetry collector, and Mezmo will ingest and parse the data. Since there is no longer any need to install the Mezmo agent for users of OpenTelemetry, they can achieve faster time-to-value with Mezmo.

Looking Forward

OpenTelemetry represents an integral part of Mezmo’s strategy as we advance. We see immense value in the future of OpenTelemetry and open standards in general for providing better visibility and actionability across development, operations, and security. While enrichment can still occur through the Mezmo Agent, expanding our support for logs pre-enriched with additional correlations opens up many use cases. These are cases where seeing context for a log line in the Mezmo UI can mean the difference between identifying an issue in minutes or hours. 

To install the Mezmo Exporter for OpenTelemetry and start seeing more context in your log data, visit the GitHub Repository here, and visit Mezmo’s documentation. Our product and engineering teams are working with customers to understand and build upon our support for OpenTelemetry data. If you have an interesting use case or want to learn more, reach out at outreach@mezmo.com to speak to an expert.

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