Splunk has announced the donation of the extended Berkeley packet filter (eBPF) collector to OpenTelemetry, extending the type and scope of observability data collected for modern, cloud-based applications to include network telemetry.

Splunk’s OpenTelemetry donation further reinforces its commitment to democratizing how data is collected from infrastructures and applications, furthering the belief that the value of observability is what customers get out of their data, not how it is gathered. OpenTelemetry provides an open standards approach for collecting data, giving IT and DevOps teams more freedom and flexibility to accelerate their digital transformation journeys.

Splunk’s donation of the eBPF Collector to OpenTelemetry creates an accurate, complete model of service dependencies and service health by tracking network connections from every container transparently. This in turn allows organizations to measure the impact of infrastructure and cloud network problems on distributed services within seconds, significantly decreasing mean-time-to-detection and improving team productivity.

The eBPF Collector generates high-fidelity network telemetry that recognizes all service-to-service interactions, without sampling or service changes. It uses extended Berkeley packet filter technology and provides organizations with access to a wide range of application and kernel telemetry that was previously unavailable.

The eBPF Collector also provides the OpenTelemetry community with a platform to collect this data in real-time, with high-granularity and extremely low impact to user workloads.