The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, announced the graduation of OpenTelemetry, a vendor-neutral, open source observability framework designed to standardize the collection, processing, and exporting of telemetry data—specifically metrics, logs, and traces.
“As organizations increasingly scale AI and cloud native workloads, real time observability is critical for operational success,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF. “OpenTelemetry’s graduation solidifies it as the essential, unified observability standard, providing the consistent visibility required to understand and oversee complex systems. Since the project’s inception, it has been incredible to witness the sheer growth and adoption OpenTelemetry has had in the cloud native community and beyond. The project creators, maintainers and community members should all be proud of this milestone.”
Formed in 2019 through the assistance of CNCF as a merger between OpenTracing and OpenCensus, OpenTelemetry (OTel) was created to eliminate a community split between the two overlapping projects. This helped solve tool fragmentation by providing a single set of APIs, SDKs, Collector agent, and semantic conventions, thus allowing organizations to switch observability backends without re-instrumenting their entire codebase, according to the foundation.
OpenTelemetry’s rise in CNCF’s project velocity underscores the project’s growth trajectory and how deeply the technology resonates with developers and end users. Today, the project has grown to include over 12,000 contributors from over 2,800 companies and hundreds of maintainers across various language-specific Special Interest Groups (SIGs), the foundation said.
“OpenTelemetry’s graduation is the result of decades of collective effort from individuals, companies, and cloud native practitioners to make observability a built-in part of software,” said Austin Parker, OpenTelemetry governance committee and director of AI strategy, honeycomb.io. “When we launched this project, none of us expected that it would reach this level of popularity and impact. I’m incredibly thankful and indebted to our maintainers and contributors who helped get us to this point as well as the many individuals in the CNCF who have been a part of this journey.”
The project’s widespread adoption is gaining new interest as a layer to observe performance, reliability, accuracy and trustworthiness in AI workloads
OpenTelemetry continues to focus on its production readiness by recently adding support for new languages such as Kotlin and also promoting Profiles, now officially in alpha. It deeply integrates into the broader CNCF observability ecosystem and works alongside Kubernetes, Fluentd, Jaeger, and Prometheus.
To officially achieve graduation, OpenTelemetry successfully engaged in a third-party independent security audit and reviews for core components such as the OpenTelemetry Collector, along with a formal governance review to confirm maturity. The project has also incorporated community feedback into updates to improve its production readiness.
The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) provides technical leadership to the cloud native community, defining its vision and stewarding projects through maturity levels up to graduation. OpenTelemetry’s graduation was supported by TOC sponsors Emily Fox and Davanum Srinivas, who conducted a thorough technical due diligence of the project.
To learn more about OpenTelemetry and join the community, visit https://opentelemetry.io/.
For more information about this news, visit www.cncf.io.