LFX Mentorship: Developing Guidelines for OTel Survey Analysis and Communication

[AndrejKiri]

Description

Various special interest groups (a.k.a. SIGs) in the OpenTelemetry project run surveys to understand the experience of the end-users better. To run surveys efficiently, SIG End-user provides guidelines and assistance to people running surveys. In the past, SIG End-user focused on providing guidelines around survey design. Now we would like to move forward and cover survey data analysis and communication findings.

The mentee in this project will describe a step-by-step survey data analysis process and tools that OTel contributors without deep data analytics knowledge can leverage to analyze their survey data – from cleaning and coding of data, through descriptive statistics, cross-tabulation, to visualization. In addition, the mentee will come up with suggestions on how to improve existing and/or propose new ways to communicate survey findings from surveys to the OpenTelemetry community. [Bonus] The mentee might also execute one survey to test out the guidelines.

Applications

Recommended Skills

• Being comfortable to talk with end-users and stakeholders in English.
• Interest or currently working in UX, user research, or data analytics
• Familiarity with spreadsheets (Google Sheets, Excel)
• Basic understanding of databases and querying
• [Bonus] Familiarity with Python and its data science libraries (e.g., pandas, numpy)

Timeline

Activity	Dates (2025)
Mentee Applications Open	Thurs, July 31, 2025 11AM PDT (18:00 UTC) – Tue, August 12, 2025 11AM PDT (18:00 UTC)
Application Review Period	Wed, August 13 – Tue, August 26, 2025 11AM PDT (18:00 UTC)
Selection Notifications	Wed, August 27

As in https://github.com/cncf/mentoring/tree/main/programs/lfx-mentorship/2025/03-Sep-Nov

Submissions

➡️ Folks interested in this project can apply at the project page on LFX Portal. Make sure to review these LFX guidelines before applying.

Other info

Mentors

• @avillela
• @AndrejKiri

Mentee

• @E-STAT

[priyanshuharshbodhi1]

Hey @AndrejKiri @avillela , I am interested in applying to this project in term 3.

I was wondering—should my primary focus be on refining the proposal for this project, or is it also a good idea to start contributing to some of the open issues alongside it?

[AndrejKiri]

Hi @priyanshuharshbodhi1!

Glad to hear that you are interested. The project proposal is not yet approved. Once it will be, we will share more details about application in this issue. 🙂

If you want to contribute to other open issues of our SIG, feel free to do so, but I don't expect this impacting the selection process in any way.

[dikshant182004]

hi @AndrejKiri ,this side dikshant jha ,It looks like the application is not yet approved as u mentioned but still ,can u provide me the sample survey data that u have mentioned in the project .Earlier i have worked with the forms data (kind of field data ) so i just wanna confirm that do in this project we have to make some kind of etl pipeline that will run analysis on the data or just have to show how to perform the scraping ,EDA or analytic stuff on that data and make it simple and understandable to otel contributers. + I would like to know how your survey data is available like is it in form of table or in mongo ,becz if we want to communicate findings and perform good analysis we need to convert it into relational tables for better distribution ,graphs etc.

[AndrejKiri]

Hi @dikshant182004,

We get the data from standard survey software, like GoogleForms, and it is then stored as a .csv files in the SIG End-user repository (for example this file). No scraping is needed. The technical approach to analysis will be up to mentee to choose.

If you want to learn more about the surveys we run, feel free to check out some of the surveys in this repo (e.g. the Collector survey).

[dikshant182004]

okay @AndrejKiri i have got the gist of the data u have provided .As u mentioned above that in past there are guidelines already set for the survey design and now we want to create a framework or set of guidelines that others can follow when analyzing and communicating survey results related to OpenTelemetry end-user feedback.
I do have a clear picture of the goal of this project now ,I just wanna ask that what is the depth of analysis we are aiming for like just simple base layer analysis including some mathematical summary ,good vizualization and a descriptive stats stuff or it should include the result of some statistical tests (chisquare ,anova) or some specific distribution ,interactive (dynamic ) charts ,some sentiment analysis or segmentation /clustering etc Becz we need to define our depth and the way we want to perceive our analysis becz at the time of communication it will matter the most .
Do we have any communication channel where we can discuss regarding this project .and do i just only have to propose my idea in the portal for this project with a jupiter notebook of analysis i am aiming for ,as it is a more documented based project or should i start looking some prerequisites that needs to be known before proposing the solutiuon other than data .

Its just a ambition idea i came to think of but if we want to stick to the guidelines part only we can skip this and just provide a simple jupiter notebook as an example of our survey data analysis guideline

In addition to the written guidelines, I would love to build a lightweight automated analysis pipeline that accepts survey CSVs and provide a summary report (counts, charts, distributions, statistical insights ,distribution ,everything on one plate ).This would make it easy for future contributors or SIG members to quickly understand new survey data while still following the analysis and communication standards defined in the guidelines. + we can wrap this automation in some streamlit web app just for more ease and user friendly

[AndrejKiri]

@dikshant182004

I just wanna ask that what is the depth of analysis we are aiming for.

This is something we will figure out throughout the project. I think it will mainly depend on the mentees capabilities and vision for the project.

Do we have any communication channel where we can discuss regarding this project.

Discussing things here in the issue is the best for transparency, IMO. If this doesn't work for you for whatever reason, you can try also in #otel-sig-end-user in CNCF Slack (here is a link to join).

Do i just only have to propose my idea in the portal for this project

Once the applications are opened, you will be able to submit your CV and cover letter in the portal. You can share your ideas about how would you approach this project in the cover letter. No need to do any actual analysis for the application.

should i start looking some prerequisites that needs to be known before proposing the solutiuon other than data.

All the information for this project is in the portal and this issue. If you have any additional questions, feel free to ask.

[dikshant182004]

Thanks for all the clarification @AndrejKiri .I will work on my proposed approach and if i encounter any issue or some queries i will ask u .It would be great if u can share the past guidelines about survey design .

[AndrejKiri]

It would be great if u can share the past guidelines about survey design.

@dikshant182004 all the guidelines we have are published in this repo here. We do not have any guidelines related to data analysis and communication currently. The mentee for this project will create them.

[AndrejKiri]

➡️ Applications are open in the LFX portal. Folks can apply until August 12th.

[dikshant182004]

all the guidelines we have are published in this repo here. We do not have any guidelines related to data analysis and communication currently. The mentee for this project will create them.

thanks for the guidelines @AndrejKiri .I will look into its structure and plan my approach accordingly.

[rahulshendre]

➡️ Applications are open in the LFX portal. Folks can apply until August 12th.

Hi @AndrejKiri, glad to hear that the project proposal was approved.
I have been learning about OTel for a few days now, and how it links with Prometheus.
Prometheus also did a somewhat similar research in term 1 of LFX'25
prometheus/prometheus#15909

I wouldn't say that their UX research matches to what OTel aims to achieve here, but it has some similarities. That said, I have been studying that research (surveys were a big part of it) and have found a lot of insights, on the same.

Will definitely fill out the application for this project :)