Embrace announced that the donation of its Kotlin implementation and SDK to OpenTelemetry has been accepted.
This contribution expands vendor-neutral observability support across client and server-side applications written in Kotlin.
OpenTelemetry is an incubating Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project developed by end users, open source contributors, and vendors to advance interoperable, portable observability standards. Kotlin is the default language for modern Android development, and Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) is increasingly used to share code across Android, iOS, web, and server-side applications. This contribution enhances OpenTelemetry’s reach to Kotlin and KMP use cases, enabling teams to capture telemetry in a way that better aligns with user-facing applications.
“OpenTelemetry is becoming the global foundation for observability, and meaningful contributions to that foundation matter,” said Andrew Tunall, President and Chief Product Officer at Embrace. “With Kotlin now central to mobile, frontend, and backend development, and with growing community investment in client-side observability, this is an exciting moment for the ecosystem. We’re proud to donate a Kotlin Multiplatform implementation that supports production-ready, real-world engineering workflows.”
Enabling client-side observability for Kotlin and KMP
The implementation can be used for backend development needs, and it also introduces new support for client-side environments like mobile and web. Client-side environments present unique observability challenges, requiring teams to understand not just whether an application is functioning, but how end-users experience workflows and why outcomes change in production.
While Kotlin applications running on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) can use OpenTelemetry through Java interoperability, teams building shared logic with Kotlin Multiplatform often require a solution that operates without JVM dependencies. The contributed implementation addresses these needs while remaining aligned with OpenTelemetry’s specification-driven approach. It supports two modes of operation:
- Compatibility mode, which interoperates with the OpenTelemetry Java SDK for Android and JVM targets. This enables engineering teams to leverage existing instrumentation built by the JVM community.
- Regular mode, which is a re-write of the OTel spec in Kotlin. This can be used for both JVM and non-JVM targets.
At the time of contribution, the project includes tracing and logging APIs, providing a foundation for modeling user workflows and correlating events across platforms.
Community stewardship and ecosystem impact
Embrace will continue to contribute and maintain the implementation alongside the broader OpenTelemetry community and encourages additional contributors to participate.
“The real power of OpenTelemetry is the standard itself – a shared contract that allows many implementations to evolve and serve different environments,” said Jamie Lynch, Senior Software Engineer at Embrace and a Maintainer of the OpenTelemetry Kotlin project. “By contributing a Kotlin Multiplatform implementation, we’re investing in a future where frontend teams can build observability on the same open foundations as the backend, while meeting the realities of modern app development.”
Developers interested in using or contributing to the OpenTelemetry Kotlin Multiplatform implementation can:
- Access the project on GitHub: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-kotlin
- Learn more about the Kotlin SIG: https://opentelemetry.io/community
- Join the conversation in the #otel-kotlin channel in the CNCF Slack: https://slack.cncf.io/
- Read more about the process and rationale for this contribution on the official CNCF blog
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