---
title: "Announcing a Community Demo for OpenTelemetry"
source: OpenTelemetry Documentation
source_url: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry.io
licence: CC-BY-4.0
domain: engineering
subdomain: opentelemetry-docs
date_added: 2026-04-25
---

## TL;DR

The OpenTelemetry community has taken a good preexisting demo (thanks,
[Google](https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/microservices-demo)!) and is in
the process of making it even better. Every GA SDK (besides Swift) will be
represented, demo support will be extended to Metrics and Logs, and canonical
scenarios will be documented for each signal, with fault injection, and more!

If you want to skip the details then clone our
[repository](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-demo) then run
`docker compose up`[^1] from the command line. There are a couple
[technology requirements](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-demo-webstore#local-quickstart)
so be sure to check those out too.

The demo takes 15-20 minutes to build the first time so we encourage you to do
some stretching and take a water break in the meantime.

Your command line output should look like this:

![Console output](otel-webstore-app-output.png)

- Once the images are built you can access the web store at:
  <http://localhost:8080>

- And the Jaeger UI at: <http://localhost:8080/jaeger/ui>

Congratulations! You can now indulge in retail therapy and submit telemetry. A
true victory.

## Success of the Commons

There are a couple universal problems that are the driving force behind our
joint demo effort.

As OpenTelemetry matures, users and enterprises are increasingly looking for
best practice guides on how to onboard their services to the new paradigm or
demo applications so that they can try out the new tools themselves. However,
community working groups and vendors lack a singular sophisticated platform to
demonstrate their technologies on. Greeting the world can only get us so far.

Multiple vendors have written their own demo applications but are wholly
responsible for the development and ongoing support. The existing demos are all
feature incomplete in their own ways with missing languages, restrictions on
backend choice, and they’re overly reliant on instrumentation libraries.

### Project Goals

- Provide developers with a robust sample application they can use in learning
  OpenTelemetry instrumentation.
- Provide observability vendors with a single, well-supported, demo platform
  that they can further customize or simply use OOB.
- Provide the OpenTelemetry community with a living artifact that demonstrates
  the features and capabilities of OTel APIs, SDKs, and tools.
- Provide OpenTelemetry maintainers and working groups a platform to demonstrate
  new features/concepts in real world like scenarios.

## Current State

As a starting point, we have selected a fork of the popular GCP microservices
demo. Our first feature additions have been to simplify local deployment by
consolidating the project onto a single docker compose file, updating the
documentation, and replacing a preexisting service with a Ruby example.
Otherwise the preexisting feature set from the GCP demo remains the same:

- 10 application microservice with support for 6 languages (C#, Go, Java,
  Node.js, Python, and Ruby)
  - Ruby support was added within the last 2 weeks of publishing date
- Designed to work on docker locally
- Uses Redis cache
- Auto-instrumentation using instrumentation libraries Tracing support for the
  gRPC, Redis, and HTTP libraries
- Jaeger visualizations for distributed traces, forwarded by OpenTelemetry
  collector
- Always on sampling (100% of telemetry is submitted) and synthetic load
  generation

### Current Architecture

![Current architecture](current-demo-architecture.png)

### BYOB (Bring Your Own Backend)

Jaeger is great (really) but what if you want to try this out with your APM
vendor of choice? You can send data to your preferred backend by simply changing
the
[Collector config file](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-demo#bring-your-own-backend)
to use their Collector exporter or by using your vendor's fork of our demo.

Lightstep has an
[excellent blog](https://lightstep.com/blog/observability-mythbusters-how-hard-is-it-to-get-started-with-opentelemetry)
they just published on how to get started sending data to power their
experiences from their forked version of our demo.

## Future State

### Upcoming New Features

We have a lot of exciting improvements that are planned or in progress to turn
this application into the canonical example of the full power of OpenTelemetry.
Below is a semi-exhaustive list of upcoming features but we're not limiting
ourselves to just the items listed here.

- Language examples for
  [C++](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-demo/issues/36),
  Erlang/Elixir,
  [PHP](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-demo/issues/34), and
  [Rust](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-demo/issues/35)
- Extend support to
  [Metrics](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-demo/issues/43) and
  [Logs](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-demo/issues/44) for all
  GA SDKs
- Visualization components to consume Metrics
- Implementation of multiple instrumentation techniques
- Auto-instrumentation using the agent in a sidecar
- Manual instrumentation of all signals
- [Service Level Objective](https://github.com/OpenSLO/OpenSLO#slo) (SLO)
  definition and tracking
- Additional instrumentation libraries introduced where needed
- Demonstrations of the ability to add
  [Baggage](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-demo/issues/100) and
  other custom tags
- Continue to build on other cloud native technologies like:
  - Kubernetes
  - gRPC
  - [OpenFeature](https://github.com/open-feature)
  - [OpenSLO](https://github.com/OpenSLO/OpenSLO)
  - etc.
- An enhanced OpenTelemetry Collector gateway capabilities for ingestion,
  transformation, and export
- Probability based sampling
- Feature flag service to demonstrate various scenarios like fault injection and
  how to emit telemetry from a feature flag reliant service

### Future Architecture

![Future architecture](future-demo-architecture.png)

## Going Forward

We’re still at the beginning of our journey but there’s great momentum behind
this project. If you’re interested in contributing we’d love your support. There
are links in our GitHub repository on how to get involved and you can
[track our overall progress](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-demo/issues)
from there.

### Interesting Links

- [Demo Requirements](/docs/demo/requirements/)
- [Get Involved](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-demo#contributing)

[^1]: {{% param notes.docker-compose-v2 %}}
