I am excited to announce our latest milestone in enhancing observability and performance monitoring for our clients: full support for OpenTelemetry (OTel). This significant addition allows APIContext to seamlessly integrate into any Application Performance Monitoring (APM), log, or analytics tool that accepts OpenTelemetry, including industry-leading platforms such as Prometheus, Jaeger, Zipkin, New Relic, Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk, and Elastic.
Why OpenTelemetry?
OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework that provides a standardized approach to collecting and exporting telemetry data such as traces, metrics, and logs. By supporting OpenTelemetry, APIContext extends our synthetic monitoring capabilities to share comprehensive telemetry data, including full API call logs, results, and details, as well as results from API workflows.
This integration is particularly valuable for industries with stringent security and privacy requirements, such as healthcare and banking. Traditional APM and log analysis tools often face limitations when handling real traffic logs due to the risk of overexposing sensitive data. APIContext’s use of synthetic API calls circumvents these concerns, ensuring that critical performance and diagnostic data can be shared without compromising security or privacy.
A Commitment to Open Standards
Our support for OpenTelemetry is not an isolated initiative but an expansion of APIContext’s long-standing strategy to embrace and promote open standards. We have a rich history of supporting open standards, including OpenID Connect, OAuth, and OpenAPI Specifications. These standards have been instrumental in fostering interoperability, security, and innovation in our products.
Our Conformance functionality leverages the OpenAPI specification, ensuring our customers’ APIs adhere to industry standards and best practices. For authentication, we support OAuth, OpenID Connect, and advanced authentications like FAPI, FHIR, and others, providing secure and reliable methods for identity management. Additionally, APIContext actively contributes to the OpenID Foundation through participation in working groups, shaping the future of open standards.
By adopting and championing open standards, we ensure that our clients can integrate seamlessly with a wide array of tools and platforms, avoiding the pitfalls of vendor lock-in and proprietary frameworks. This commitment aligns with our core belief that our responsibility is to create valuable, adaptable products that empower our customers.
Why We Support Open Standards
Reflecting on over 20 years of designing products, I’ve witnessed firsthand the transformative power of open standards. Here are the key reasons we champion them at APIContext:
- Interoperability: Open standards ensure seamless integration across diverse systems and platforms, reducing compatibility issues and enhancing overall system cohesion. Without open standards, we would not have the modern internet. For example, TCP/IP is probably the grandfather of successful open standards, enabling the internet’s explosive growth by ensuring that different networks could communicate reliably. Modern applications need interoperability baked in to be effective.
- Flexibility: Open standards provide the freedom to adopt various tools and technologies without being constrained by proprietary systems. Look at how many flavors of authentication there are! The tool can fit the job. And no one likes vendor lock in, except, of course, owners of legacy products.
- Innovation: The collaborative nature of open standards fosters innovation, resulting in more robust and advanced solutions. The OpenID Foundation (OAuth, the OpenAPI Initiative (OpenAPI Specification), and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (OpenTelemetry) are all active projects with participation of deep expertise and people working at the cutting edge of their problem space.
- Cost Efficiency: Leveraging open standards reduces development and maintenance costs by utilising existing frameworks and tools. Every developer will look for a library or framework first before coding something new. Open standards allow all applications to operate on a level playing field, with access to high quality, performant functionality, no matter the team size.
- Security: Open standards are subject to extensive scrutiny by the global developer community, leading to more secure and reliable implementations. Active projects like the ones we support have an accessible, transparent development process and rigorous peer review.
- Scalability: They support scalability by providing proven frameworks capable of handling growth and increased demand. In the case of OpenTelemetry, broad adoption means that many systems can consume our telemetry feed.
- Compliance: Many industries require the use of open standards to ensure transparency and consistency in operations. The healthcare industry, for example, relies on FHIR standards to ensure interoperability and compliance in electronic health records and health information exchanges. More industries are adopting compliance standards, either because of regulation or industry best practices. Open banking has been driven by regulations, while the TM Forum’s Open API is a voluntary industry initiative.
- Community and Support: The large community backing open standards offers extensive support, resources, and shared knowledge. This creates a network effect for developers on all sides of the standard – creators, implementers, service providers, and users.
APIContext’s support for OpenTelemetry underscores our commitment to open standards and our mission to provide our clients with the most advanced, secure, and flexible solutions. By integrating OpenTelemetry, we not only enhance the observability of our synthetic monitoring product but also reinforce our dedication to interoperability and innovation.
Happy alerting!
