A Guide to OpenTelemetry - Part 2: When Will OTel Be Ready?

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

OpenTelemetry is not fully mature today, although you can begin to implement components currently. The question is: When will OpenTelemetry be fully ready?

Start with: A Guide to OpenTelemetry - Part 1

Destined for Success

One of the indicators of the importance of OpenTelemetry is the rapid rise of the project.

"In just three years, OpenTelemetry has gone from an idea on a whiteboard to being the most popular cloud-native open source project in the world, behind Kubernetes itself," says Austin Parker, Head of Developer Relations at Lightstep by ServiceNow. "It's remarkable how far the project has come in such a short time, and there's still plenty of opportunities to get involved."

"For organizations deep into their cloud-native journey, OpenTelemetry is already significant — hundreds of organizations are running it in production today," Parker adds.

"OpenTelemetry is already one of the most significant technologies of 2022 and is continuing to become increasingly important to IT Ops and DevOps teams as users discover its benefits," Martin Thwaites, Developer Advocate at Honeycomb, agrees. "OpenTelemetry represents a shift in thinking from proprietary instrumentation to a unified standards-based approach for generating and ingesting telemetry data. As a result, I believe it will become ubiquitous, much like current container orchestration standards."

OpenTelemetry is the future of software quality

In addition, Michael Haberman, CTO and Co-Founder of Aspecto, points out the important impact OTel is expected to have on the software itself: "In the next couple of years, OpenTelemetry will become the sole infrastructure to collect telemetry of any kind. OpenTelemetry is the future of software quality."

Large companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft already use OpenTelemetry to monitor their clouds and provide customized OpenTelemetry distributives, according to Vladimir Mihailenco, Co-Founder of Uptrace. "OpenTelemetry also provides massive benefits for small emerging companies that simply don't have resources to maintain client libraries for tens of programming languages and hundreds of frameworks."

"As long as OpenTelemetry stays open and vendor-neutral, it is doomed for success and simply does not have any alternatives," Mihailenco continues. "The quality and number of instrumentations already surpasses OpenCensus or OpenTracing, and companies maintaining proprietary instrumentations just can't keep up."

"Even leaders from around the world are discussing the significance of OpenTelemetry, with indications for how it could transform global infrastructures," says Nitin Navare, CTO of LogicMonitor. "Those who are not prepared for the evolving demands of the future will be left behind."

The Current State of OpenTelemetry

The readiness of OpenTelemetry varies, depending on the signal. Tracing is the farthest along. Metrics is getting there. Logging, however, still has a way to go.

According to the OpenTelemetry project:

■ The tracing specification is now completely stable, and covered by long-term support.

■ OpenTelemetry Metrics is currently under active development. The data model is stable and released as part of OTLP. Experimental support for metric pipelines are available in the Collector, and Collector support for Prometheus is under development, in collaboration with the Prometheus community.

■ OpenTelemetry Logging is currently under active development. The logs data model is released as part of the OpenTelemetry Protocol, and log processing for many data formats has been added to the Collector. An OpenTelemetry logging SDK is currently under development, however, an OpenTelemetry logging API is not under development yet.

Keep in mind that the current status of each component continues to change.

Pranay Prateek, Co-Founder of SigNoz, explains further: "OpenTelemetry provides instrumentation to generate logs, metrics, and traces. Tracing is stable in almost all languages. Metrics are stable and generally available in Java/Python/Dotnet and RC/Beta in other important languages. Logs are experimental in Java/Python/Dotnet. However, you can use the OpenTelemetry collector to collect logs from your existing pipelines."

When Will OpenTelemetry Be Completely Ready?

Today we do not have a set date when OpenTelemetry will be completely ready. The prevailing industry opinions range widely from about one to five years. The following are some predictions from the experts:

Torsten Volk, Managing Research Director, Containers, DevOps, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA): "OpenTelemetry is already on a rapid growth curve and will reach critical mass over the next year or two, as automatically visualizing dependencies, analyzing performance, and conducting root cause analyses quickly becomes critical for a growing share of distributed microservices applications."

Prateek from SigNoz: "The community is widely adopting OpenTelemetry. Most observability vendors provide support for OpenTelemetry data formats. But as it's a huge initiative, we expect it to reach maturity in most signals in the next one to two years."

Navare from LogicMonitor: "OpenTelemetry is still relatively new. It will still need 1-2 years of maturity before reaching its full potential. Having said that, there is still value in businesses pursuing it now."

Daniel Khan, Director of Product Management (Telemetry) at Sentry: "It will take at least another 12 to 24 months until traces, metrics, logs, and library support will be on par with what traditional APM vendors provide today."

Sajai Krishnan, General Manager, Observability, Elastic: "While OpenTelemetry is maturing rapidly, and organizations are increasingly making this a core requirement, it still feels like broader maturity across languages, frameworks, logs, and agents is about three years out (a 'finger in the wind' estimate)."

Download the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for APM and Observability

Alois Reitbauer, Chief Product Officer at Dynatrace: "We need to think of the timeline in the following three phases: OpenTelemetry being required, most frequently used, and finally becoming the predominant technology. Right now we are in the required stage. My belief is that it will take 3 to 5 years until OpenTelemetry is the predominant technology."

Haberman from Aspecto: "We believe it will take about five years for OpenTelemetry to achieve widespread adoption."

Parker from Lightstep by ServiceNow: "Over the next five years, it will become more accessible via integrations into managed cloud services, container orchestrators and service meshes, and language class libraries which should aid adoption for organizations that aren't quite as mature yet."

Go to: A Guide to OpenTelemetry - Part 3: The Advantages

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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A Guide to OpenTelemetry - Part 2: When Will OTel Be Ready?

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

OpenTelemetry is not fully mature today, although you can begin to implement components currently. The question is: When will OpenTelemetry be fully ready?

Start with: A Guide to OpenTelemetry - Part 1

Destined for Success

One of the indicators of the importance of OpenTelemetry is the rapid rise of the project.

"In just three years, OpenTelemetry has gone from an idea on a whiteboard to being the most popular cloud-native open source project in the world, behind Kubernetes itself," says Austin Parker, Head of Developer Relations at Lightstep by ServiceNow. "It's remarkable how far the project has come in such a short time, and there's still plenty of opportunities to get involved."

"For organizations deep into their cloud-native journey, OpenTelemetry is already significant — hundreds of organizations are running it in production today," Parker adds.

"OpenTelemetry is already one of the most significant technologies of 2022 and is continuing to become increasingly important to IT Ops and DevOps teams as users discover its benefits," Martin Thwaites, Developer Advocate at Honeycomb, agrees. "OpenTelemetry represents a shift in thinking from proprietary instrumentation to a unified standards-based approach for generating and ingesting telemetry data. As a result, I believe it will become ubiquitous, much like current container orchestration standards."

OpenTelemetry is the future of software quality

In addition, Michael Haberman, CTO and Co-Founder of Aspecto, points out the important impact OTel is expected to have on the software itself: "In the next couple of years, OpenTelemetry will become the sole infrastructure to collect telemetry of any kind. OpenTelemetry is the future of software quality."

Large companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft already use OpenTelemetry to monitor their clouds and provide customized OpenTelemetry distributives, according to Vladimir Mihailenco, Co-Founder of Uptrace. "OpenTelemetry also provides massive benefits for small emerging companies that simply don't have resources to maintain client libraries for tens of programming languages and hundreds of frameworks."

"As long as OpenTelemetry stays open and vendor-neutral, it is doomed for success and simply does not have any alternatives," Mihailenco continues. "The quality and number of instrumentations already surpasses OpenCensus or OpenTracing, and companies maintaining proprietary instrumentations just can't keep up."

"Even leaders from around the world are discussing the significance of OpenTelemetry, with indications for how it could transform global infrastructures," says Nitin Navare, CTO of LogicMonitor. "Those who are not prepared for the evolving demands of the future will be left behind."

The Current State of OpenTelemetry

The readiness of OpenTelemetry varies, depending on the signal. Tracing is the farthest along. Metrics is getting there. Logging, however, still has a way to go.

According to the OpenTelemetry project:

■ The tracing specification is now completely stable, and covered by long-term support.

■ OpenTelemetry Metrics is currently under active development. The data model is stable and released as part of OTLP. Experimental support for metric pipelines are available in the Collector, and Collector support for Prometheus is under development, in collaboration with the Prometheus community.

■ OpenTelemetry Logging is currently under active development. The logs data model is released as part of the OpenTelemetry Protocol, and log processing for many data formats has been added to the Collector. An OpenTelemetry logging SDK is currently under development, however, an OpenTelemetry logging API is not under development yet.

Keep in mind that the current status of each component continues to change.

Pranay Prateek, Co-Founder of SigNoz, explains further: "OpenTelemetry provides instrumentation to generate logs, metrics, and traces. Tracing is stable in almost all languages. Metrics are stable and generally available in Java/Python/Dotnet and RC/Beta in other important languages. Logs are experimental in Java/Python/Dotnet. However, you can use the OpenTelemetry collector to collect logs from your existing pipelines."

When Will OpenTelemetry Be Completely Ready?

Today we do not have a set date when OpenTelemetry will be completely ready. The prevailing industry opinions range widely from about one to five years. The following are some predictions from the experts:

Torsten Volk, Managing Research Director, Containers, DevOps, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA): "OpenTelemetry is already on a rapid growth curve and will reach critical mass over the next year or two, as automatically visualizing dependencies, analyzing performance, and conducting root cause analyses quickly becomes critical for a growing share of distributed microservices applications."

Prateek from SigNoz: "The community is widely adopting OpenTelemetry. Most observability vendors provide support for OpenTelemetry data formats. But as it's a huge initiative, we expect it to reach maturity in most signals in the next one to two years."

Navare from LogicMonitor: "OpenTelemetry is still relatively new. It will still need 1-2 years of maturity before reaching its full potential. Having said that, there is still value in businesses pursuing it now."

Daniel Khan, Director of Product Management (Telemetry) at Sentry: "It will take at least another 12 to 24 months until traces, metrics, logs, and library support will be on par with what traditional APM vendors provide today."

Sajai Krishnan, General Manager, Observability, Elastic: "While OpenTelemetry is maturing rapidly, and organizations are increasingly making this a core requirement, it still feels like broader maturity across languages, frameworks, logs, and agents is about three years out (a 'finger in the wind' estimate)."

Download the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for APM and Observability

Alois Reitbauer, Chief Product Officer at Dynatrace: "We need to think of the timeline in the following three phases: OpenTelemetry being required, most frequently used, and finally becoming the predominant technology. Right now we are in the required stage. My belief is that it will take 3 to 5 years until OpenTelemetry is the predominant technology."

Haberman from Aspecto: "We believe it will take about five years for OpenTelemetry to achieve widespread adoption."

Parker from Lightstep by ServiceNow: "Over the next five years, it will become more accessible via integrations into managed cloud services, container orchestrators and service meshes, and language class libraries which should aid adoption for organizations that aren't quite as mature yet."

Go to: A Guide to OpenTelemetry - Part 3: The Advantages

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

Observability Is the New Control Plane for Enterprise Transformation

The enterprises that will define the next decade are not the ones that deployed the most technology. They are the ones who understood what their technology was actually doing. That distinction is not a philosophical point. It is the central operational challenge facing every organization that has spent the last five years modernizing at speed ...

When AI Becomes the Corporate OS

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...

The $600 Billion Wake Up Call

In 2026, the cost of downtime or an outage is no longer just a technical inconvenience; it's a $600 billion wake up call for global businesses. As our digital ecosystems become  more interconnected, each touchpoint introduces new risks and multiplies the consequences when things go wrong. And the data is clear: aggregate downtime costs  for Global 2,000 companies have surged 50% since 2024, reaching a staggering $600 billion ...

Breaking Down Agentic AI Fragmentation and Complexity with Governance

Deloitte found that 74% of enterprises expect to deploy agentic AI solutions in the next 24 months. However, the rush to deployment is outpacing foundational work, though. Only 21% of enterprises have fully formed agent governance models in place. The result? AI agents deployed without guidance or governance begin to function as fragmented islands of complexity ...

Cloud Spend Is Rising and Cloud Optimization Is Key to Funding AI and Protecting Margins

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As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

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Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

AI Deepfakes: Rethinking Trust in the Workplace

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

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