Announcing the OpenTelemetry JavaScript SDK 2.0

By Jamie Danielson (Honeycomb) |

Exciting news: OpenTelemetry JavaScript has released SDK 2.0!

What is JS SDK 2.x?

JS SDK 2.x encompasses new releases of the @opentelemetry/* JavaScript packages published from the opentelemetry-js repository, except the API and semantic-conventions packages. The package versions for this new major will be >=2.0.0 for the stable and >=0.200.0 for the unstable packages. Details on the full list of packages can be found in the migration guide.

What has changed?

In summary:

  • The minimum supported Node.js has been raised to ^18.19.0 || >=20.6.0. This means that support for Node.js 14 and 16 has been dropped.
  • The minimum supported TypeScript version has been raised to 5.0.4.
  • The compilation target for transpiled TypeScript has been raised to ES2022 (from ES2017).
  • The public interface has changed.

Details:

Why was this done?

We knew we would gain the greatest benefit by allowing breaking changes to improve things related to:

  • Optimization: removing classes and namespaces to allow better minification and tree-shaking.
  • Better tooling and support: dropping old runtimes and tool versions to take advantage of enhanced ESM support and simplify documentation.
  • Velocity: reducing code complexity and removing deprecated fields for faster feature and maintenance work.

This also begins our goal of releasing a new SDK major release every year.

For a more detailed explanation of why 2.0, see issue #4083.

How can I get involved?

Last modified March 26, 2025: [blog] Announce JS SDK 2.0 (#6574) (28e3ebad)