OpenTelemetry Demo is a microservice-based distributed system designed to illustrate OpenTelemetry instrumentation in a near real-world environment.
The demo addresses the challenge of understanding how to implement observability across multiple services and languages. It provides a realistic e-commerce application called the Astronomy Shop that demonstrates instrumentation patterns, allowing developers to see how traces, metrics, and logs flow through a complex system. The application spans multiple programming languages including TypeScript, Go, Java, Python, Rust, .NET, and Erlang, showing how OpenTelemetry integrations work across different technology stacks.
Teams evaluating this project should use it as a reference implementation when building observability into distributed systems or when learning OpenTelemetry patterns. It suits organizations that need concrete examples of instrumentation best practices across multiple languages, and it serves as a foundation for vendors and tool authors who want to demonstrate their OpenTelemetry integrations. The project explicitly welcomes forks and extensions, with documented guidance for maintaining custom versions.
Development is active and ongoing, with regular updates to the codebase and documentation. The project maintains a structured contribution process including regular community calls, and it actively seeks community involvement in expanding language coverage and feature representation across the OpenTelemetry specification.
