Proposal: wasi-otel

[calebschoepp]

Motivation

WASI Otel exposes an OpenTelemetry interface to Wasm components to allow them to collect trace, metric, and log signals conveniently using the [OpenTelemetry SDKs](OTel SDKs).

This work was originally being pursued under the banner of WASI Observe. Throughout that process the contributors felt that it was best to pursue creating an interface that was tightly bound to the upstream OpenTelemetry APIs. Both because that is what most developers actually required and because it was more easily achievable than creating a generic interface in the near term. Hence WASI OTel was created to make a space for this work leaving WASI Observe as a space for more generic observability interface in the future.

Goals

• Enable Wasm components to use standard OTel SDKs
• Closely mirror the upstream OTel APIs.

Non-Goals

• Provide an interface that is easily consumed directly by components.

More details

To learn more you can visit the calebschoepp/wasi-otel repo which has current the WITs. It has more detail on the considered alternatives.

Significant work has been done to prototype the tracing component of this interface. Demos of this exploration can be found here.

As this proposal matures logging and metrics will need to be added to the interface.