[GSoC 2026] Introduction & Questions - Aniket Kale - Use OpenTelemetry for Jenkins Jobs on ci.jenkins.io

Contributing GSoC
1

Hi everyone, my name is Aniket Kale and I’m writing to introduce myself and express my strong interest in the “Use OpenTelemetry for Jenkins Jobs on ci.jenkins .io” project for GSoC 2026.

About Me:

  1. 2+ years of professional DevOps experience.

  2. Worked extensively with Jenkins CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes, Terraform (GCP/Azure), Prometheus and Grafana

  3. Hold the Azure DevOps Engineer Expert certification

  4. Independently built and deployed production infrastructure on AWS

  5. GitHub: Aniket-d-d (Aniket Kale) · GitHub .

What I’ve Done So Far:

  1. Ran the official demo in opentelemetry-plugin/demos/ locally using Docker Compose — Jenkins, OTel Collector, Jaeger and Prometheus all running together. I can see Jenkins pipeline executions as distributed traces in Jaeger with spans for each stage.

  2. Reviewed the plugin source code, specifically OpenTelemetryConfiguration.java and JenkinsOpenTelemetryPluginConfiguration.java , to understand how the SDK initializes. When no OTLP endpoint is configured, the plugin explicitly sets otel.traces.exporter=none, otel.metrics.exporter=none and otel.logs.exporter=none, placing the SDK in complete no-op mode.

  3. Browsed live builds on ci.jenkins .io and reviewed the project description and infrastructure documentation.

  4. Read the official OpenTelemetry documentation to understand core concepts, the three signals (traces, metrics, logs), how the OTel Collector works as a vendor-agnostic pipeline with receivers, processors and exporters, and how tail-based sampling helps manage high cardinality at scale.

Questions for the Mentors:

  1. The project description mentions “introduction of the use of OpenTelemetry” on ci.jenkis. io and infra.ci.jenkins .io Is the existing opentelemetry-plugin already installed on these controllers, or does the project start from scratch including plugin installation and configuration?

  2. “Given that the plugin will generate massive telemetry volume at ci.jenkins.io scale, what sampling strategy do the mentors prefer — purely tail-based, or a hybrid approach with head-based pre-filtering at the Collector level?”

  3. Given that the skills listed are OpenTelemetry, Observability and DevOps, Is the primary work infrastructure-focused (deploying and configuring the OTel Collector on Kubernetes, Helmfile, endpoint configuration) rather than Java plugin development further like adding Otel Collector to it?

Looking forward to contributing and learning from this community!
@krisstern @shivaylamba