The milestone for OpenTelemetry reflects widespread production adoption and a stable, vendor-neutral observability standard  

Key Highlights:

MINNEAPOLIS – OBSERVABILITY SUMMIT – May 21, 2026 – The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today 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.

In the seven years since its creation, OpenTelemetry has achieved the second-highest project velocity among over 240 projects in the cloud native ecosystem, second only to Kubernetes, and is widely regarded as the “de facto” standard for open source observability. 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).

“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. In the past twelve months, the OpenTelemetry JavaScript API package was downloaded more than 1.36 billion times and the OpenTelemetry Python API package surpassed 1.3 billion downloads, with both API packages setting new monthly download records in April 2026. Organizations such as Alibaba, Anthropic, Bloomberg, Capital One, eBay, FICO Software, Heroku and others rely on OpenTelemetry to monitor and secure their systems.

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.

“OpenTelemetry’s graduation is important for the broader cloud native ecosystem. OpenTelemetry has helped reduce complexity for platform teams while enabling deeper visibility across modern distributed systems, allowing organizations to better understand system behavior and boost security efforts. The project’s rapid community growth and adoption demonstrate the maturity required for CNCF graduation.” – Davanum Srinivas, TOC sponsor

“Graduation signals that OpenTelemetry has reached a level of technical maturity required for the most demanding cloud native environments. It provides the consistent telemetry framework necessary to monitor and optimize these systems with confidence. This milestone reflects a focused community effort to deliver a robust project that the industry has embraced as an essential component of the observability stack.” – Emily Fox, TOC sponsor

OpenTelemetry’s Impact on the Broader Linux Foundation Community

Beyond the CNCF, several other Linux Foundation projects have integrated OpenTelemetry to solve specific observability challenges.

“OpenTelemetry’s graduation is a major accomplishment for the Cloud Foundry community. We integrated the OpenTelemetry Collector as our standard for metrics egress because we needed a vendor-neutral, scalable path that lets platform engineering teams connect to their monitoring tool of choice—without bottlenecks, without lock-in and without us having to maintain custom integrations for every tool. In large-scale corporate environments, where complexity is a constant, the combination of Cloud Foundry and OpenTelemetry provides the robust, standardized infrastructure that major organizations depend on. OpenTelemetry has delivered exactly that. Now, as a graduated project, our users can build on this foundation with even greater confidence. We’re looking forward to expanding our integration to cover logs and traces as OpenTelemetry continues to mature, further propelling this solution forward for our enterprise members.” – Chris Clark, program manager, Cloud Foundry Foundation

“OpenTelemetry’s graduation is an important milestone across the whole Linux Foundation project ecosystem. Within OpenSearch, users combine the power of OpenTelemetry Collector, Data Prepper and OpenSearch Dashboards to create unified observability pipelines that deliver powerful visualizations and intelligent analytics. This graduation helps observability move beyond monitoring and troubleshooting toward using OpenTelemetry to drive real business decisions. Open standards make that possible–enabling projects to work better together, without lock-in.” – Bianca Lewis, executive director, OpenSearch Software Foundation

Supporting quotes:

“OpenTelemetry’s graduation is a big step for teams like ours building automation and AI-driven operational workflows. Having more consistent telemetry standards across tools makes it easier to connect systems, reduce integration work and use operational data more effectively across environments. It also creates a stronger foundation for sharing context between teams, platforms, workflows and AI systems without being tied to a single vendor stack.” – Peco Karayanev, CTO Autoptic

“When we founded OpenTelemetry in 2019 I had high expectations, but if someone had told me then that it would have this much of an impact on the industry or grow a community of over 2000 people contributing each quarter, I’d have been very skeptical. OpenTelemetry has become so ubiquitous across the industry, from high-scale Kubernetes deployments, to client and IoT devices that people use every day, and even to decades-old mainframes. OpenTelemetry speaks to the critical challenges it addresses and provides deep operational value to the developers and organizations around the world who use it. Here’s to the next seven years!” – Morgan McLean, OpenTelemetry co-creator and senior director of product management, Splunk, a Cisco company

“Its graduation underlines the seismic shift that OpenTelemetry has brought to the Observability industry: instead of competing on who has the best telemetry, vendors now compete on who does the best with the telemetry everybody has. It’s a change much to the benefit of end users, who now can get more insights out of their telemetry without the painful and time-consuming process of ripping out an agent for another, or the operational headache and hazard of running multiple agents. It has also made end users much more aware of the benefits of owning and caring for the collection of their telemetry. This is an all-round, massive victory for the software industry at large.” – Michele Mancioppi, chief architect, head of open source and community, Dash0, and OpenTelemetry maintainer

“AI is writing more production code than ever, and most of it ships without runtime feedback flowing back to the people and agents that wrote it. OpenTelemetry’s graduation matters because it gives the industry a shared substrate to close that loop, turning what code actually does in production into a signal that improves what gets shipped next. Congratulations to the community on a milestone the next generation of AI-native observability is being built on.” – Bob Quillin, founder and CEO, ControlTheory

“The graduation of OpenTelemetry is a turning point for observability at a time when it’s become more important than ever. In particular, telemetry interoperability unlocks new use cases, new innovation, and deeper insights for users and providers alike. Reaching this milestone is a reflection of the energy, dedication and quality of the community behind OpenTelemetry and is a call-to-action for those still waiting to adopt.” – Gordon Radlein, senior director of engineering, Datadog

“We’ve always believed that impactful technology adoption relies on shared standards, which is why Google backed OpenTelemetry from its early days as OpenCensus. Today’s engineering teams are pushing the limits with complex systems and AI, and they shouldn’t be constrained by vendor lock-in. By rallying around a single open standard, we’re helping developers stop wrestling with fragmented tools so they can focus on shipping great software. Ultimately, this is about giving developers actual freedom while keeping the door open for innovation.”

– Richard Seroter, chief evangelist and head of open source programs, Google Cloud

“OpenTelemetry represents a pivot in the industry, from completely siloed, separate signals to a new model: shared telemetry that integrates all sources of telemetry into a single braid of data. This kind of high quality, integrated data is a first in the industry, and as it has become a standard practice, an entire generation of new observability techniques are becoming unlocked. Graduation is the perfect starting gun for this new revolution in observability.”  – Ted Young, OpenTelemetry co-creator and developer programs director, Grafana Labs

“Honeycomb has been all-in on OpenTelemetry since the start, and this graduation confirms that open standards are the foundation for observability’s next chapter. When we built our AI observability capabilities, we didn’t have to think twice about what to instrument against—OTel’s semantic conventions gave us and the whole industry a shared vocabulary that made that work possible. As the pace of delivery and iteration speeds up, this stable and open instrumentation layer is a key part in what makes it possible to continue to operate responsibly. Congratulations to the whole community for reaching this important milestone!” – Christine Yen, co-founder and CEO, Honeycomb

“Congratulations to the OpenTelemetry community on this milestone. Without high-quality telemetry, reliable systems are not possible. OpenTelemetry creates a common standard that helps boost telemetry quality. It enables teams to share code, infrastructure, and tools, so they can deliver the quality, performance and reliability customers need. As the world turns to agents and AI, high-quality monitoring that adheres to an open standard has become an even more important cornerstone in delivering agentic experiences for developing, debugging and operating cloud native services.” – Brendan Burns, Kubernetes co-founder and technical fellow, Microsoft Azure Cloud Native 

“OpenTelemetry has become the telemetry standard for modern software, and the timing could not be better. As organizations rush to put AI workloads into production, they are discovering that GenAI systems are distributed systems, with all the latency, reliability and cost questions that come with them. OpenTelemetry gives those teams a common language to instrument agents, models and the services around them without locking into any single vendor. Graduation is a recognition of how foundational the project has become, and a strong signal that the next decade of observability will be built on open standards.” – Juraci Paixão Kröhling, CEO, OllyGarden

“OpenTelemetry is an unusual OSS project: rather than being ‘a piece of code you run,’ it’s a set of loosely coupled standards, protocols and libraries that help power mature observability and security practices. It’s inspiring to see the near-universal support and compatibility from end-users, vendors and the rest of the cloud native OSS ecosystem: this is a true testament to the many end-users, vendors and partners on related projects who put in the countless hours (and pull requests) to help OTel become what it is today—thank you!” – Ben Sigelman, OpenTelemetry co-creator

Project End Users

“Observability is the foundation of trust in AI agents. OpenTelemetry’s graduation proves that vendor-neutral telemetry is ready for production at global scale — and in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, it’s how developers see inside their agents’ decisions. AWS is proud to support OpenTelemetry’s continued growth and will keep investing in making agentic workloads fully observable.” – Preethi CN, director of AgentCore, Agentic AI, Amazon Web Services

“With OpenTelemetry, Bloomberg has been able to seamlessly integrate telemetry across our infrastructure and applications, helping us standardize observability and simplify telemetry collection and analysis through a vendor-neutral framework. As a widely adopted open source project, OpenTelemetry provides us with the flexibility to integrate telemetry across a broad range of technologies and to benefit from a highly engaged user community that is driving innovation around system performance and observability.” – Andrey Rybka, head of CTO architecture and emerging technologies in the office of the CTO, Bloomberg

“OpenTelemetry has become the foundation of our observability strategy at FICO. Scaling the FICO Platform across distributed platform services required a unified standard that spans system telemetry and business events, including performance data from our decision strategy execution, without locking us into any single vendor. Its vendor-agnostic architecture is a natural fit for our multi-cloud strategy, delivering consistent visibility across cloud and hybrid environments while consolidating tool sprawl and optimizing costs. The breadth of language support and instrumentation has also accelerated how quickly our developers and customers can instrument services, giving us the agility to evolve our observability stack as our platform and business mature.” – Sean Baseman, chief architect, FICO Software

Learn more about OpenTelemetry and join the community: https://opentelemetry.io/ 

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry’s top developers, end users, and vendors and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by nearly 800 members, including the world’s largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit www.cncf.io.

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