{"id":22743,"date":"2026-07-24T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/opentelemetry-has-graduated-now-what\/"},"modified":"2026-07-24T11:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T11:00:00","slug":"opentelemetry-has-graduated-now-what","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/opentelemetry-has-graduated-now-what\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenTelemetry has graduated\u2026 Now what?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Posted on July 24, 2026
\n\t\tby Adriana Villela (Dynatrace LLC) and Reese Lee (New Relic)<\/span>\n\t\t<\/p>\n

CNCF projects highlighted in this post<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

In case you missed it:\u00a0OpenTelemetry (OTel) has officially achieved CNCF graduated status<\/a>! It now stands proudly alongside amazing open source projects such as\u00a0Kubernetes<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Prometheus<\/a>, to name just a few. It\u2019s been a long journey, and we\u2019re very excited\u2026 But, now what? To understand where we\u2019re going, it\u2019s important to understand where we came from.<\/p>\n

History<\/h2>\n

In the not-so-distant past, telemetry signals were not standardized. This meant telemetry formats differed from tool to tool, with each telemetry vendor creating and maintaining its own instrumentation libraries. Vendor lock-in was a huge problem: If you wanted to switch vendors, you had to strip out the previous vendor\u2019s libraries from your code and replace them with the new vendor\u2019s libraries. As a result, switching vendors was a nontrivial task.<\/p>\n

In addition, the three core telemetry signals \u2013 traces, logs, and metrics \u2013 were treated as separate, so there was no easy way to correlate them. Because of this, the observability story was incomplete.<\/p>\n

Previous attempts had been made at standardization: the\u00a0CNCF<\/a>\u2019s\u00a0OpenTracing<\/a>, and Google\u2019s OpenCensus<\/a>, forming the basis for what was to become OpenTelemetry.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/figure>\n

In the interest of having a single standard, OpenCensus and OpenTracing were merged to form\u00a0OpenTelemetry<\/a>\u00a0in May 2019. OpenTelemetry takes the best of both worlds, and then some, providing a tracing, metrics, and logs specification, a set of standardized APIs, and language specific implementations of these APIs, in addition to the\u00a0Collector<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Both OpenCensus and OpenTracing are now officially archived. OpenTracing was archived in January 2022, and OpenCensus was archived in July 2023.<\/p>\n

With the backing of all major observability vendors, and an active developer and end user community, OpenTelemetry became the de facto open standard for telemetry.<\/p>\n

Growth<\/h2>\n

OpenTelemetry is the second-highest velocity project in the CNCF<\/a>, just behind Kubernetes.According to the CNCF<\/a>, OpenTelemetry has \u201cover 12,000 contributions, from over 2,800 companies and hundreds of maintainers across various language-specific Special Interest Groups (SIGs).\u201d<\/p>\n

Since its inception, traces, logs, and metrics have reached general availability (GA).\u00a0Profiling<\/a>\u00a0was added as a new OTel signal. The\u00a0OpenTelemetry Demo<\/a>\u00a0has expanded. The\u00a0OTel Collector<\/a>\u00a0has expanded, with new components being added regularly. We\u2019ve seen the addition of new components to the OTel ecosystem to help make it more ergonomic, including\u00a0OpAMP<\/a>, the\u00a0OTel Operator<\/a>,\u00a0OTel Weaver<\/a>, and\u00a0OTel Arrow<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is a very impressive achievement, considering that OpenTelemetry is a mere seven years old. It sends a clear signal: OpenTelemetry is here to stay. And graduation helps to cement that.<\/p>\n

Graduation!<\/h2>\n

OpenTelemetry achieved graduated status in May 2026, having started its path to graduation in 2025.<\/p>\n

So what does it take to become a graduated CNCF project? Projects must fulfill the following criteria:<\/p>\n

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  1. Production adoption.<\/strong>\u00a0Many different organizations<\/a>, such as\u00a0GitHub<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Farfetch<\/a>, run OpenTelemetry in production.<\/li>\n
  2. Robust governance.<\/strong>\u00a0OTel has a documented\u00a0governance model<\/a>\u00a0with clearly defined roles around election and retirement, along with transparent communication and decision-making.<\/li>\n
  3. Community health.<\/strong>\u00a0OpenTelemetry has an established process for PR review and management. The project has\u00a0a number of regular contributors across multiple organizations<\/a>. Reviewers are responsive, ensuring that issues and fixes are addressed in a timely manner.<\/li>\n
  4. Security.<\/strong>\u00a0OTel has undergone at least one independent security audit, and all critical issues identified have been remediated.<\/li>\n
  5. API stability.<\/strong>\u00a0APIs are stable, properly versioned, and released at a regular cadence, with backwards compatibility ensured so as to not break existing implementations.<\/li>\n
  6. Documentation.<\/strong>\u00a0OTel\u2019s documentation provides an architectural overview, along with user, operator, and contribution guides.<\/li>\n
  7. TOC application and review.<\/strong>\u00a0A graduation application template was submitted for review by the\u00a0CNCF\u2019s Technical Oversight Committee (TOC)<\/a>. You can check out\u00a0OTel\u2019s submission<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    As you can see, a\u00a0lot<\/em>\u00a0of work was done behind the scenes by many dedicated folks, ranging from OTel maintainers, to end users, to CNCF TOC members to make this happen.<\/p>\n

    We\u2019d like to give a\u00a0huge<\/strong>\u00a0shoutout to all in the OpenTelemetry community who made graduation happen, and especially to\u00a0Austin Parker<\/a>, OpenTelemetry Governance Committee member and former Community Manager, who led the graduation effort with the CNCF.<\/p>\n

    What this means for you<\/h2>\n

    So what does OpenTelemetry graduation mean for you, dear reader?<\/p>\n

    Dan Gomez Blanco, one of the maintainers of the\u00a0OTel End User SIG<\/a>\u00a0put it perfectly\u00a0in a recent LinkedIn post<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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    For end users, this graduation signals that OTel is far from being an \u201cemerging standard\u201d. Its contributor health, security and quality standards, governance processes, and wide adoption have been evaluated to be at the level required by any enterprise, of any scale. So, if you\u2019re in the 25% of skeptics not using OTel, there\u2019s really no excuse anymore. There has never been a better time to adopt it!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    In a nutshell: OpenTelemetry is production-ready, and fully open for business. If your organization was holding out on using OpenTelemetry, you have no more excuses!<\/p>\n

    What\u2019s next?<\/h2>\n

    Software is never really \u201cdone\u201d, and the same goes for OpenTelemetry. It will continue to grow and evolve: from the specification to the API & SDK to the Collector, and beyond.<\/p>\n

    Looking ahead, we see a strong need for observability around new types of workloads, such as agentic workflows, an area covered by the emerging\u00a0generative AI semantic conventions<\/a>. We\u2019re also tackling challenges in areas that we hadn\u2019t focused on as much previously, such as browser and mobile observability.<\/p>\n

    More mature teams are looking for guidance on using OpenTelemetry at scale. That\u2019s where tools like\u00a0Weaver<\/a>, which helps teams define and govern their telemetry schemas, come into play. We\u2019re also making OTel easier to roll out by packaging components into installable modules through\u00a0OpenTelemetry Packaging<\/a>, and by enabling zero-code instrumentation with the OpenTelemetry Injector<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    OpenTelemetry has a long future ahead of it, but we also know that it\u2019s only possible through continued work by maintainers and contributors, and of course, through continued support and adoption by our end users.<\/p>\n

    We can\u2019t wait for what the future has in store for us, and we\u2019re excited to have you along for the ride.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

    Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Posted on July 24, 2026 by Adriana Villela (Dynatrace LLC) and Reese Lee (New Relic) CNCF projects highlighted in this post In case you missed it:\u00a0OpenTelemetry (OTel) has officially achieved CNCF graduated status! It now stands proudly alongside amazing open source projects such as\u00a0Kubernetes\u00a0and\u00a0Prometheus, to name just a few. It\u2019s been a long journey, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":22744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[143],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22743\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}