OpenTelemetry recently announced that its OTel-Arrow project has entered Phase 2, highlighting Greptime’s contribution to the ecosystem.

As a dedicated player in the cloud-native observability and big data communities, Greptime implemented an end-to-end Arrow Flight gRPC channel in Rust for high-performance telemetry data transport — a milestone that substantially advances the engineering maturity of the Otel-Arrow project. This work was led and contributed by senior Greptime engineer Lei Huang.

（Figure 1: OTel Collector Gateway）

📝 Phase 1 focused primarily on optimizing traffic between collectors and included a compatible OTLP exporter and receiver for the existing OpenTelemetry components.

Greptime’s Key Contribution to Otel-Arrow in the OpenTelemetry Ecosystem

The OTel-Arrow project aims to introduce Apache Arrow’s zero-copy, columnar data format to the world of observability, enabling tight integration with the OpenTelemetry stack. Using Arrow Flight over gRPC, telemetry data can be transferred in high-throughput, well-compressed, and scalable batches between SDKs and collectors — especially beneficial for high-cardinality and high-dimensional telemetry workloads.

In PR #303, the Greptime team led the implementation of Arrow Flight gRPC communication between the Rust SDK and a Rust-based collector, enabling efficient transport of structured, columnar telemetry data. This work establishes Arrow Flight as the high-speed pipeline for the Rust side of the Otel-Arrow stack and lays a solid foundation for supporting multi-language collectors (e.g., Go and Java) in the future.

Future Outlook: A Pluggable, High-Performance Rust Telemetry Pipeline

In Phase 2 of the OTel-Arrow project, the community will focus on deepening the Rust implementation of the OTAP (OpenTelemetry Arrow Protocol) data path.

• Achieving true zero-copy, column-aware data transfer between SDK and Collector;

• Integrating Apache Arrow with analytical engines like DataFusion for seamless data lake compatibility;

• Developing a secure, high-performance, and pluggable Rust data pipeline that works across diverse runtime environments;

• Ensuring interoperability with the OpenTelemetry Golang Collector for hybrid language support.

Open Collaboration for the Next Generation of Observability Platforms

As noted in the OpenTelemetry blog post, OTel-Arrow is redefining the paradigm for telemetry data transport. Greptime is proud to be among the early adopters and contributors driving this evolution. We believe true open-source innovation comes from deep collaboration and practical engineering.

GreptimeDB now includes initial support for OTel-Arrow, and we’re continuously refining the integration. We're committed to building a more efficient and intelligent observability infrastructure, hand-in-hand with the open-source community.

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About Greptime

GreptimeDB is an open-source, cloud-native database purpose-built for real-time observability. Built in Rust and optimized for cloud-native environments, it provides unified storage and processing for metrics, logs, and traces—delivering sub-second insights from edge to cloud —at any scale.

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