A new certification program from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Linux Foundation is aimed at validating the skills needed to utilize OpenTelemetry to gain visibility across distributed systems.
The OpenTelemetry Certified Associate (OTCA) certification is designed for application engineers, DevOps engineers, system reliability engineers, platform engineers, or IT professionals looking to increase their abilities to leverage telemetry data across distributed systems of cloud-native and microservices-based applications.
“OpenTelemetry is a transformative open-source observability project for empowering engineers to deeply analyze the intricate behaviors of distributed systems across many integrations,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the CNCF, in a statement. “The OTCA shows a developer can implement observability frameworks as well as understand the subtleties of performance and data flow, skills critical for proactive and precise problem-solving in cloud-native applications.”
OpenTelemetry is the second most active open-source project of the CNCF, following Kubernetes. It has been used since it matured in August 2021 to capture observability data across distributed systems in a vendor-neutral, standardized way and collect telemetry data. Telemetry data is critical to observability technologies because it provides raw, detailed information about system behavior to provide insights beyond basic monitoring metrics. Telemetry data can also be used to enable proactive problem detection and resolution in distributed systems.
“OpenTelemetry is quickly becoming a ‘must-have’ component of cloud native, and this certification is a great way for developers to demonstrate their mastery. We’re excited to launch this program with CNCF and anticipate it to be just the first step in learning programs that we build together,” said Austin Parker, OpenTelemetry Governance Committee and director of open source at honeycomb.io, in a statement.
The OpenTelemetry framework enables tools to capture telemetry data from cloud-native software, and it looks to collect observability data from traces, metrics, and logs. This type of standard support in network observability tools is becoming a must-have feature because of how important it is for tools to share data so IT can get the complete picture and identify anomalies that might impact performance.
“Earning your OTCA boosts your career by equipping you with sought-after skills for modern IT operations,” said Clyde Seepersad, senior vice president and general manager, Linux Foundation Education, said in a statement. “These skills position you as a proactive, problem-solving professional in an era of complex, distributed systems.”
The primary competencies covered by the OTCA certification are:
- Fundamentals of Observability
- The OpenTelemetry API and SDK
- The OpenTelemetry Collector
- Maintaining and Debugging Observability Pipelines
OTCA includes 12 months to schedule and take the exam and two exam attempts, with the exam priced at $250. The certification exam is now available for purchase, and the ability to schedule the OTCA exam will begin in January 2025. The OTCA certification was built in collaboration with Honeycomb, with the participation of people from Chronosphere, Elastic, Lynxmind, F1rst Digital Services, Sicredi, DBS Bank, Accenture, Datadog and Lightstep.