Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM, AIOps, Observability, OpenTelemetry and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2024. Part 4 covers OpenTelemetry.

Start with: 2024 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 1

Start with: 2024 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 2

Start with: 2024 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 3

INDUSTRY EMBRACES OPENTELEMETRY

Next year, we're going to see more embrace of OpenTelemetry across the entire industry — opening up the future of instrumentation.
Camden Swita
Senior Product Manager, New Relic

With OpenTelemetry reaching general availability across all the three pillars of observability, namely logs metrics and traces, I expect we shall see increased adoption among end-users and observability vendors, further pushing out proprietary and open source telemetry shipping and scraping agents.
Dotan Horovits
CNCF Ambassador and Principal Developer Advocate, Logz.io

Open source will continue to power the world, and projects like OpenTelemetry will continue to gain mass adoption as they stabilize and the ecosystem matures. We'll also see more growth within open-source development as developer productivity and software development lifecycle tools enter into the foundation model of governance, such as OpenTofu. The future is, ultimately, decentralized, and we'll start to see open source rise up as the best way and place to build protocols for the many tools and applications being used.
Austin Parker
Head of Open Source, Honeycomb

The digitization boom has resulted in exponential growth in data. However, enterprises continue to struggle with the ability to correlate data and gain proactive insights, often due to silos across tools and data. To combat this issue, successful enterprise IT leaders are starting to embrace open standards, which help to avoid silos and vendor lock-in. An open and common schema alleviates many challenges associated with gaining insights into data while providing the ability to interoperate among systems. As the adoption of multi and hybrid cloud grows, along with the adoption of a diverse technology stack, OpenTelemetry continues to gain momentum and mature its capabilities across metrics, logs, traces, and profiling.
Gagan Singh
VP, Product Marketing, Elastic

OpenTelemetry will continue to gain traction in the coming years. Even if a customer chooses a single vendor, they will retain control over their data. They won’t feel the burden of vendor lock-in if their vendor’s costs rise — they will retain the freedom to add or switch vendors or tools and take their data with them. That’s been true for years, and it will remain true in 2024.
Splunk Report: Observability Predictions 2024

CUSTOMERS DEMAND OPENTELEMETRY

Fear will battle control in the war for OpenTelemetry. But who will win? On one hand, vendors and providers will be leery to grant access to their low-level data which may increase the risk of service-level breaches or poorly-performing ad providers. On the other hand, customers and practitioners will continue desiring ownership and visibility. They'll also want to reduce the risk of the proliferation of multiple APM tools and high costs while enhancing their ability to handle the increasing volume of data. We believe the adage "the customer is always right" will prevail here.
Leo Vasiliou
Director of Product Marketing, Catchpoint

Customers will force observability vendors to treat OpenTelemetry as "first-class citizen." Overwhelmingly, DevOps teams want to standardize the way they collect and analyze observability data using OpenTelemetry. Largely, this is to enable vendor neutrality and interoperability. However, OTel remains a "second-class citizen" in most observability products — vendors limit functionality and support for OTel in lieu of their proprietary schemas. In 2024, we will see this reach a boiling point. Rising costs are already causing customers to evaluate new tooling and those that don't push OTel to the forefront will be left behind.
Ozan Unlu
CEO, Edge Delta

OPENTELEMETRY SURPASSES KUBERNETES CONTRIBUTION VELOCITY

In 2024, the question will turn from "Have you considered Open Telemetry?" to "˜Why aren't you using Open Telemetry?" Standards-forward enterprises will continue adopting OpenTelemetry at scale, and by the end of the year, we may see Open Telemetry surpass Kubernetes for contribution velocity.
Liz Fong-Jones
Field CTO, Honeycomb

OPENTELEMETRY CRITICAL TO OBSERVABILITY

OpenTelemetry's role as the foundational framework for observability will become increasingly critical. It provides the essential tooling — APIs, SDKs, and instruments — necessary for the generation, collection, and management of telemetry data. Without such tools, true observability is unattainable. This data foundation is what allows AIOps to excel, filtering the noise to pinpoint what matters amidst the deluge of alerts. Projects like the Linux Foundation's Confidential Computing contribute to this landscape by enhancing the security of data, which is essential for trustworthy observability. Thus, OpenTelemetry underpins the entire observability process, from data collection to actionable insights, ensuring that as we step into the future, we are equipped not just to gather information, but to intelligently act on it.
Keith Cunningham
VP of Strategy, Sylabs

OPENTELEMETRY EXPLORES CONTINUOUS PROFILING AND OTHER TELEMETRY SIGNALS

Looking beyond the "three pillars", the focus of OpenTelemetry will shift to maturing Continuous Profiling, and perhaps exploring other emerging telemetry signals.
Dotan Horovits
CNCF Ambassador and Principal Developer Advocate, Logz.io

OPENTELEMETRY FOCUSES ON END-USER EXPERIENCE

OpenTelemetry will prioritize monitoring and enhancing the end-user experience by analyzing user journeys, collecting constructive feedback, and measuring performance metrics to improve user satisfaction.
Vladimir Mihailenco
CTO, Uptrace

Quality goes beyond which is internally controlled to include third-party — especially critical — dependencies thanks to OpenTelemetry. As the focus shifts from application exclusive to user experience inclusive, access to real-time data will be even more critical as DevOps teams ingest user experience metrics, business KPI, and SLAs.
Leo Vasiliou
Director of Product Marketing, Catchpoint

OPENTELEMETRY EXPANDS USE CASES

OpenTelemetry will expand beyond its backend-centered origins to also support customer-side telemetry and real-user monitoring use cases. We may even see bold new use cases such as CI/CD, security and FinOps.
Dotan Horovits
CNCF Ambassador and Principal Developer Advocate, Logz.io

OPENTELEMETRY STRENGTHENS PRODUCTION-GRADE CAPABILITIES

I foresee emphasis on production-grade aspects of OpenTelemetry, including ease of instrumentation, ease of operation, stability and performance. This will include enhanced automatic instrumentation, improved deployment on Kubernetes and other infrastructure types, as well as standardized remote configuration.
Dotan Horovits
CNCF Ambassador and Principal Developer Advocate, Logz.io

OPENTELEMETRY POTENTIALLY STARTS GRADUATION PROCESS AT CNCF

We announced in early November that we reached GA for OpenTelemetry, meaning that we have all three signals marked as stable: traces, metrics, and now logs as well. For 2024, we are working on getting more things stabilized, such as more semantic conventions, as well as consistent configuration across the components. Hopefully, we can also start our graduation process at the CNCF as well. We know we have work to do on the user experience and documentation and that's also a priority for the next year. I'm also very excited to see progress in other innovative areas, like profiling. All in all, 2024 is going to be a great year for the project.
Juraci Paixão Kröhling
OpenTelemetry Governing Board Member, CNCF Ambassador, and Principal Engineer, Grafana Labs

Go to: 2024 Application Performance Management Predictions - Part 5, covering AIOps.