Blog

The OpenTelemetry blog communicates new features, community reports, and any news that might be relevant to the OpenTelemetry community. This includes end users and developers. Anyone can write a blog post, read below what the requirements are.

Documentation or blog post?

Before writing a blog post, ask yourself if your content also might be a good addition to the documentation. If the answer is “yes”, create a new issue or pull request (PR) with your content to get it added to the docs.

Note, that the focus of maintainers and approvers of the OpenTelemetry Website is to improve the documentation of the project, so your blog post will have a lower priority for review.

Social Media Content Request

To request publication on OpenTelemetry’s social media channels instead of the blog, submit a social media request.

Before submitting a blog post

Blog posts should not be commercial in nature and should consist of original content that applies broadly to the OpenTelemetry community. Blog posts should follow the policies outlined in the Social Media Guide.

Linking to GitHub repositories

Blog posts are checked by markdownlint (gh-url-hash) to prevent unstable GitHub blob/tree links.

If the check reports an issue:

• Replace default-branch refs (for example main/master) with a tag/release or a commit hash.
• Use a full 40-character commit hash (short hashes are flagged).
• Run npm run fix:markdown to auto-fix what it can, then fix any remaining reported links manually.

Verify that your intended content broadly applies to the OpenTelemetry Community . Appropriate content includes:

• New OpenTelemetry capabilities
• OpenTelemetry projects updates
• Updates from Special Interest Groups
• Tutorials and walkthroughs
• OpenTelemetry Integrations
• Call for Contributors

Unsuitable content includes:

• Vendor product pitches

If your blog post fits into the list of appropriate content, you must first raise an issue with the following details:

• Title of the blog post
• Short description and outline of your blog post
• If applicable, list the technologies used in your blog post. Make sure that all of them are open source, and prefer CNCF projects over non-CNCF projects (e.g. use Jaeger for trace visualization, and Prometheus for metric visualization)
• Name of a SIG willing to sponsor your blog post. A SIG sponsor is required.
• Name of a sponsor (maintainer or approver) from that SIG, who will do the first round of review before the Comms SIG reviews the post. That sponsor must be from a different company than the author.

Opening an issue before submitting a pull request is mandatory. Pull requests for blog posts that were not preceded by an accepted issue can be closed without further review.

Maintainers of SIG Communication will verify that your blog post satisfies all the requirements for being accepted. The SIG sponsor must complete their review before the Comms SIG will look at the post. The author of the blog post is responsible for finding a Sponsor.

If your issue has everything needed, a maintainer will verify that you can go ahead and submit your blog post.

Call for Contributors

If you are proposing the creation of a new project or SIG, or if you are offering a donation to the OpenTelemetry project, you will need additional contributors to be successful with your proposal. To help you with that, you can propose a blog post that is a “Call for Contributors” (CfC).

This requires, that you follow the processes for new projects and donations.

Submit a blog post

You can submit a blog post either by forking this repository and writing it locally or by using the GitHub UI. In both cases we ask you to follow the instructions provided by the blog post template.

Fork and write locally

After you’ve set up the local fork you can create a blog post using a template. Follow these steps to create a post from the template:

1. Run the following command from the repository root:

   npm exec --no -- hugo new content/en/blog/$(date +%Y)/short-name-for-post.md
   

   If your post has images or other assets, run the following command:

   npm exec --no -- hugo new content/en/blog/$(date +%Y)/short-name-for-post/index.md
   

2. Edit the Markdown file at the path you provided in the previous command. The file is initialized from the blog-post starter under archetypes.

3. Put assets, like images or other files, into the folder you’ve created.