OTel Me About It: Latest Updates in WASI OTel

Andrew Steurer -

With WebAssembly firmly in production, it is more important than ever to have observable Wasm workloads. OpenTelemetry is the gold standard for modern observability and now it’s coming to WebAssembly. This talk presents the WASI OTel proposal, a new WASI interface that enables using OpenTelemetry SDKs from within your Wasm components. You’ll see how traces, metrics, and logs can be emitted seamlessly from Wasm applications, with a live demo using Spin, the leading framework for building and running serverless Wasm workloads. We’ll unpack the key design choices behind WASI OTel and show how the WebAssembly component model unlocks powerful new capabilities, such as automatically enriching traces with information from the component graph. We’ll close with an update on the proposal’s progress within both the WebAssembly and OpenTelemetry communities, and how this work is shaping the future of observability for Wasm in production.