Announcing the OpenTelemetry Demo 2.0

By Juliano Costa (Datadog) |

We’re thrilled to announce that OpenTelemetry Demo 2.0 is here! We’ve been busy behind the scenes, polishing up the demo to make it more complete, robust, and user-friendly. We believe these exciting features and improvements deserve a major release!

But before we jump in, let’s take a look at some of the project stats.

Statistics

With a total of 140 contributors, the OpenTelemetry Demo has been starred 2048 times. On October 26, 2022 — two days after General Availability — we had a record 40 stars in a single day. If you use the Demo, consider leaving us a star to help promote the project.

There are a total of 1.8K forks of the Demo. Notably, Abhishek Veeramalla’s fork stands out with 142 stars and has been forked 425 times.

The Demo containers have been pulled over 12 million times (11.8M times from ghcr.io plus 433K times from hub.docker).

The OpenTelemetry Demo includes the following CNCF projects:

What’s new in 2.0?

This release is packed with exciting upgrades and changes. The following list is a quick rundown of the highlights:

  • Flagd-ui introduced: One of our most missed features since version 1.9.0 is back! You can again manage feature flags directly in the Demo. For more details, see the Feature Flags page.
  • Image-provider introduced: Since release 1.10.0, we’ve introduced a new service called Image Provider, which delivers static product images. This service, built on NGINX, returns images for every product and demonstrates how to instrument OpenTelemetry with an NGINX proxy using the NGINX Native OpenTelemetry module.
  • Redis replaced with Valkey: Since version 1.11.0, we’ve replaced the Redis service with Valkey, introducing another CNCF project to the OTel Demo.
  • Build args moved to .env file: If you forked the Demo and were using any custom image, keeping your fork in sync with upstream was always a hassle. To make things easier, we’ve moved most configurations to the .env file. We’ve also added a _DOCKERFILE environment variable, which allows you to specify the location of your build instructions.
  • Services renamed: If you’ve been using the OTel Demo since its inception, you’re probably accustomed to the verbose naming of every service. For 2.0, we’ve streamlined things by dropping the -service suffix from all service names. Now, instead of ad-service, cart-service, and checkout-service, you’ll simply see Ad, Cart, and Checkout.
  • Accounting rewritten in .NET: We wanted to showcase OTel’s .NET auto-instrumentation in the Demo without adding an extra service. Since the Accounting service was originally written in Go—and we already had another service in that language—we decided to rewrite it in .NET. Now, the Demo features both the Accounting and Cart services, each demonstrating a different way to instrument .NET applications.
  • Added exemplars: Cart service now records exemplars for GetCart and AddItem operations, allowing correlation between metrics and spans. See the Exemplars section of the Cart documentation to learn more.
  • React Native example app: One of the most significant additions to this release is the brand new React Native app example. It can be built for Android or iOS (currently executable locally only). For instructions on how to run and test it, see the React Native App documentation page.
  • Span links for messaging spans: Following OTel’s recommendation to always link producer and consumer spans (Messaging spans - Trace structure), the Demo now demonstrates this best practice. Consumer spans for Accounting and Fraud-Detection are linked to the producer span (Checkout/orders publish).
  • Multi-arch builds: To ensure that a variety of users can run the Demo locally, we’ve introduced new make targets to support building multiplatform images (for both arm64 and amd64 architectures).
  • Configured Dependabot: We were falling behind on some dependencies, but now Dependabot is configured to keep the Demo up-to-date automatically.

Current challenges

Of course, with great updates come a few growing pains. Here’s what we’re currently tackling:

  • Grafana dashboards: As semantic conventions and tools evolve with new releases, ensuring that our Grafana dashboards remain fully functional is a challenge. If you’re experienced with Grafana, we’d love your help!
  • Dependabot PR testing: While Dependabot helps keep all service dependencies up-to-date, we haven’t yet implemented automated tests to ensure that updates don’t cause crashes. This testing is still a manual process.
  • Demo scalability: Balancing the expansion of demo scenarios while keeping the Demo easily runnable locally is one of our biggest challenges. With 19 different services and new ideas emerging weekly, we’re continuously working to maintain this balance.

What’s next?

We’re not stopping here! Here are some of the next steps we’re excited about, and we’d love your help:

  • Bring Erlang/Elixir back: In March 2024, we removed the initial Feature Flag service written in Elixir in favor of OpenFeature and Flagd. Since then, the Demo hasn’t included a service in that language, but we’re aiming to reintroduce Erlang/Elixir. Any help in this area would be much appreciated!
  • Remote access for React Native app: We plan to enable the React Native app to access a remotely running Demo, expanding its usability.
  • Better automation and testing: We’re working to improve our automation and testing processes—especially for Dependabot PRs—to streamline our development workflow.

Get involved!

Your feedback and contributions are what make this project thrive. If you’re interested in helping out—whether it’s polishing up the dashboards, automating tests, or bringing Erlang/Elixir back—please jump in and join the discussion on our GitHub repository / SIG meetings (calendar-demo) or hop into the #otel-community-demo slack channel.

Thank you for your continued support, and happy demoing!

Last modified February 21, 2025: [demo] Add blog post about Demo 2.0 (#6362) (4ebd4f4a)