F5 announced its continued support for Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s OpenTelemetry, an open source framework providing a standardized collection of tools to instrument, generate, capture, and export telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces) to help IT teams better analyze their solutions’ performance and behavior. In a development partnership with ServiceNow, F5 has contributed approximately 40,000 lines of code to double the compressibility of the OpenTelemetry Protocol.

This innovation reduces the costs of exporting data from data centers, clouds, and edge locations to a telemetry platform by half, depending on the specific data workload. To put the size of this contribution in perspective, the typical software developer produces between 10,000 and 25,000 lines of code each year and the average open source project comprises around 35,000 lines of code.

Optimizing the collection, ingestion, and analysis of telemetry data such as metrics, logs, and traces enables organizations to more efficiently and performantly deliver intelligent, automated responses amidst variable IT conditions. As an example, telemetry can help security teams detect and prevent fraudulent and nefarious activities by comparing login and behavioral characteristics of users and applications against typical usage patterns. Customers who export such telemetry data from public clouds to a telemetry aggregation system using this new refinement to the OpenTelemetry Protocol can expect their egress costs related to telemetry traffic to be reduced by 50%.