Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM, AIOps, Observability, OpenTelemetry, and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2022. Part 4 covers OpenTelemetry.

Start with: 2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with: 2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

Start with: 2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

OPENTELEMETRY GROWS FAST

Building upon my predictions from last year, OpenTelemetry will continue to mature including new signals and capabilities to differentiate the community from the proprietary data collection.
Jonah Kowall
CTO, Logz.io

It would be hard to identify a faster growing and highly supported project than Open Telemetry, because it fits that sweet spot of making production data non-proprietary, so the later use or reuse of data is no longer a constraint to adoption for diehard open source afficionados, nor the leading proprietary observability and security platforms.
Jason English
Principal Analyst, Intellyx

OpenTelemetry will mature and emerge as the lingua franca for observability data in cloud native applications. Popular web frameworks, libraries, databases, and orchestration tools will begin to adopt it as a built-in feature.
Austin Parker
Principal Developer Advocate , Lightstep

OpenTelemetry, which graduated to incubation status in the CNCF earlier this year, has been steadily gaining adoption over the past few years and we believe that 2022 will be a breakthrough year for the standard. Why is 2022 the year this will happen? The OpenTelemetry libraries have been steadily improving and have now reached a point of maturity where more organizations are comfortable with adopting it. On top of that, the majority of organizations are centralizing their approach to observability, making it easier to rollout and propagate instrumentation. With ubiquitous adoption of OpenTelemetry, technologies such as distributed tracing, which have been held back by limited adoption of standards, can start to deliver on their promise.
Martin Mao
CEO and Co-Founder, Chronosphere

OPENTELEMETRY DRIVES OBSERVABILITY

OpenTelemetry will continue expansion, allowing more players to integrate observability across a wider space. This standard will allow observability to be integrated into a broader range of tools, allowing for more novel monitoring capabilities.
Heath Newburn
Senior Product Sales Specialist, PagerDuty

Kubernetes has been essential for the growing adoption of software containers. In 2022, we'll see the same adoption approach around OpenTelemetry for observability. Kubernetes became a standard in itself for running container orchestration and it has certainly won that war. Now OpenTelemetry will bring the exact same standards that we need for observability. OpenTelemetry has become widely adopted by the software development community, but it's still just at the beginning of its journey. The community made Kubernetes the success it is, and we'll see the same with OpenTelemetry as customers demand better integration and less lock-in. For vendors involved around applications and software — from more traditional approaches like application performance management through to software development pipelines and management tools, and through to cloud-native services — supporting OpenTelemetry will be table stakes in the future. This will make a massive difference to customers, and help them all improve the results they can get across their application infrastructure, from the software development process through to areas like security.
Frank Reno
Principal PM and Open Source Ambassador, Sumo Logic

Quite simply, if you're not thinking about OpenTelemetry, then you're not thinking about observability. And that's not going to get you to where you need to go. If you're not thinking about OpenTelemetry, you're already behind the curve in figuring out how to have the right level of visibility to deliver on the service level objectives that your customers expect of you in this day and age. Companies have complex distributed microservices consisting of tens, hundreds or thousands of components that are all working together to deliver on that customer experience. Suppose you can't correlate between those components or between the different signals easily. In that case, you're going to really slow down your ability to monitor, diagnose and troubleshoot issues that are happening in an effective manner. You might be thinking about observability and maybe you think you've got a great system set up with implementing multiple tools, but the most important thing about observability is the ability to correlate these complex systems and signals. That all happens with OpenTelemetry.
Frank Reno
Principal PM and Open Source Ambassador, Sumo Logic

OPEN TELEMETRY REPLACES CMDB

The CMDB will continue to lose its luster. As the rise of serverless, containers, and other ephemeral capabilities grow, the ability to leverage CMDB to drive consistency will become more and more difficult. Instead, things like OpenTelemetry will grow in importance.
Heath Newburn
Senior Product Sales Specialist, PagerDuty

TELEMETRY ENABLES HOLISTIC ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS

Telemetry — in the sense of tracing, beyond just metrics — will work it's way down the stack: from the application layer into the platform itself, with Kubernetes being the platform of choice for cloud-native development. We see telemetry already being implemented in some of the core components and it'll spread to other components. This will enable holistic root cause analysis and correlation across the stack, top down and bottom up.
Marcel Hild
Manager AIOps, Office of the CTO, Red Hat

Go to: 2022 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 5, covering ITSM.