Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM, AIOps, Observability, OpenTelemetry and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2023. Part 3 covers OpenTelemetry.

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

For more on OpenTelemetry: A Guide to OpenTelemetry

OPENTELEMETRY ESSENTIAL IN 2023 AS OBSERVABILITY GETS MORE COMPLEX

OpenTelemetry was a big 2022 topic and it's very likely it will continue or amplify in 2023. Because of the holistic visibility OpenTelemetry brings to complex IT environments, more organizations will see not just its value, but will actively incorporate it into their roadmaps.
Gregg Ostrowski
Executive CTO, Cisco AppDynamics

In today's climate, it has never been more challenging for organizations to successfully capture distributed traces, application metrics and logs to gain full observability of their tech stack. In looking forward to 2023 and beyond, this process will only increase in complexity. That's why OpenTelemetry is the foundation for an effective observability practice within organizations, and the future of observability overall. Only through OpenTelemetry can organizations easily (in a vendor-neutral-fashion) capture their observability data, ensure it is structured consistently, send it to the correct destinations and most importantly — retain ownership over their data.
Spiros Xanthos
SVP, General Manager, Observability, ITOps, Splunk

In 2023, more companies will adopt OTel, and the project will carry an influential position in becoming the sole infrastructure to collect telemetry of any kind. We will see more modern R&D teams owning their telemetry data for various purposes and using OTel to generate and manage it. We will also see a growing number of observability teams forming (though the team's title may vary).
Michael Haberman
CTO & Co-founder, Aspecto

OpenTelemetry is the second largest CNCF project after Kubernetes but this doesn't actually say much about adoption. A strong signal for adoption is the number of downloads for a given technology and the OpenTelemetry Node.js SDK went from roughly 90,000 weekly downloads in November 2021 to over a million in November 2022. This steep upwards trajectory indicates that OpenTelemetry is being adopted in real projects and will keep defining the observability market for years to come, like Kubernetes did for Infrastructure.
Daniel Khan
Director of Product Management, Sentry

OPENTELEMETRY DRASTICALLY CHANGES APPM LANDSCAPE

OpenTelemetry will drastically change the APM landscape — With the exception of vendors, no one really likes vendor lock-in, but it is, in many cases, a necessary evil. Tools like OpenTelemetry show the possibility of changing that. Traditionally, organizations struggled when changing APM vendors, because of the complexity of re-instrumenting their entire environment with a new data collection agent. OpenTelemetry removes that roadblock and allows organizations to choose (and switch between) vendors that meet their data analysis needs, without worrying about the collection of the data. Besides a loss of historical data, changing APM vendors when you are using OpenTelemetry becomes a much less daunting task, which will result in an upending of the APM market as customers change the criteria on which they are basing their purchasing decisions.
Josh Chessman
VP, Strategy & Innovation, Netreo

OPENTELEMETRY WILL BE OBSERVABILITY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR DEV/DEVOPS/OPS

OpenTelemetry will be the observability infrastructure for Dev/DevOps/Ops that comes as an additional layer on top cloud infrastructure. This process will accelerate during 2023. We believe it will take about five years for OpenTelemetry to achieve widespread adoption.
Michael Haberman
CTO & Co-founder, Aspecto

OPENTELEMETRY BECOMES #1 PROJECT IN CNCF

OpenTelemetry seems likely to become the #1 highest velocity project in the CNCF ecosystem. The interest from the developer community in creating an open standard for telemetry has been on the rise for quite some time, and by the end of 2023, I think OpenTelemetry will surpass Kubernetes as the fastest and most important developing CNCF project. Vendors who continue to push their own bespoke and proprietary instrumentation libraries and agents as the default way to use their products will soon find themselves on the wrong side of what consumers are demanding. In 2023, using OpenTelemetry to instrument your applications for observability, regardless of the tools you're using, will become the de facto standard.
Phillip Carter
Principal Product Manager and OpenTelemetry Evangelist , Honeycomb

MOST LARGE MONITORING VENDORS ADOPT OPENTELEMETRY

OpenTelemetry is the future of software quality. We believe that in 2023 OpenTelemetry will take another significant step toward making this statement a reality. As the project becomes more mature and stable across more signals and with a thriving community, most large monitoring vendors will complete their OTel adoption during 2023.
Michael Haberman
CTO & Co-founder, Aspecto

MORE VENDORS SUPPORT OPENTELEMETRY

As OpenTelemetry has established itself as the de facto standard, we're going to see more library and product vendors have first-class support for product OpenTelemetry formatted data streams so that clients can do a rich analysis of their workflows. We'll start to see more "OTLP Compliant Telemetry" markers as a badge of honor among vendors and SDKs."
Martin Thwaites
Developer Advocate, Honeycomb

OpenTelemetry is reaching a critical mass and will play a significant role in determining the agility and responsiveness of digital organizations. It enables them to respond quickly to customer needs and security threats. As organizations leverage OpenTelemetry to extract greater value from their data and make it more actionable, we can expect to see similar moves from observability pipelines and platform providers. More of these vendors will support OpenTelemery to simplify data ingestion and enrichment.
Ajay Khanna
CMO, Mezmo

AIOPS WILL BE USED WITH OPENTELEMETRY

OpenTelemetry will become the standard for collecting and delivering telemetry data in the coming years. More detail will be easily available, and the primary challenge for teams will be how to work with the data and draw the proper conclusions. This is where AIOps will be used more and more. The next step will be to think about industry-wide approaches to access the data.
Alois Reitbauer
Chief Technology Strategist, Dynatrace

OPENTELEMETRY METRICS WILL START REPLACING PROMETHEUS

OpenTelemetry Metrics have been steadily improving and have now reached a point where more developers are comfortable with using OpenTelemetry API to collect metrics data. That creates a chance for new products that can be built upon a richer OpenTelemetry data model to compete with Prometheus + Grafana dominance.
Vladimir Mihailenco
Co-Founder, Uptrace

OPENTELEMETRY LOOKS TO NEW SIGNALS

In three short years, OpenTelemetry has gone from an idea, to a project, to a movement — a truly unified approach to application and infrastructure telemetry data. In 2023, it will solidify support for metrics and logs, and then look to new signals such as continuous profiling.
Austin Parker
Head of DevRel, LightStep

OPENTELEMETRY FOCUSES ON API AND SDK

I expect that 2023 will bring greater focus on maturing the API and SDK for implementors, improving ease-of-use and configurability.
Austin Parker
Head of DevRel, LightStep

MORE OPENTELEMETRY DOCUMENTATION AND TUTORIALS BECOME NECESSARY

OpenTelemetry documentation and tutorials will become more necessary as users need to learn how to handle OpenTelemetry at scale. Initial adoption will get easier.
Michael Haberman
CTO & Co-founder, Aspecto

Go to: 2023 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 4, covering monitoring, site reliability engineering and ITSM.