Opentelemetry blog post

[shikokuchuo]

Adds a blog post announcing OpenTelemetry support across the R ecosystem.

Scheduled for [2026-02-16].

The post covers Posit's cross-team effort to instrument Shiny, plumber2, mirai, httr2, ellmer, knitr, testthat, and DBI with OpenTelemetry tracing - enabling production observability with no application code changes.

• Explains what OpenTelemetry is (traces, metrics, logs) and why it matters for R in production
• Lists all instrumented packages with versions and what each traces
• Walks through a concrete example: a Shiny + ellmer + mirai + httr2 weather chat app, with trace screenshots
• Getting started guide (install otel/otelsdk, choose a backend, set env vars)
• Zero-code instrumentation for arbitrary packages via OTEL_R_INSTRUMENT_PKGS
• Configuration reference table

@schloerke @atheriel @gaborcsardi you're all listed as co-authors, feel free to comment / push changes directly.

[hadley]

Looks great!

[gaborcsardi]

It seems like the focus is on how people can get traces from our instrumented packages. But the title feels much broader to me. These packages are used often, but they certainly don't cover the whole R ecosystem. So maybe we could make the title more focused?

[shikokuchuo]

Thanks @gaborcsardi that's a valid point. I've made the title more focused: "OpenTelemetry for R: observability across the ecosystem" -> "Bringing OpenTelemetry to R in production".

[atheriel]

This looks great. I don't see anything that I'd want to add. Thanks for all your work on this!