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

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 24: Network Observability Tool Sprawl

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

Capacity Isn't a Guess: Observability-Driven Sizing for On-Prem Databases

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

5 Security Principles Every Entrepreneur Should Apply to Leadership

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...

Signs It May Be Time to Reassess Your IT Infrastructure Strategy

Many organizations assumed their infrastructure strategy was settled. It had been implemented, optimized and built into long-term plans. Recent changes in technology and vendor consolidation are forcing a second look. Cloud outages and licensing changes have exposed how much dependency exists on a small number of platforms. As a result, organizations are reevaluating whether those decisions still hold up under current conditions ...

Enterprise Edge AI Reaches Inflection Point

Edge AI is strategically embedded in core IT and infrastructure spending across industries, according to the 2026 Edge AI Survey from ZEDEDA. The research shows that 83% of C-suite and IT executive respondents say edge AI is important to their core business strategy ...

AI Is Hitting Operational Limits

As AI adoption accelerates, operational complexity — not model intelligence — is becoming the primary barrier to reliable AI at scale, according to the State of AI Engineering 2026 from Datadog ... The report highlights a compounding complexity challenge as AI systems scale ... Around 5% of AI model requests fail in production, with nearly 60% of those failures caused by capacity limits ...

Alert Fatigue Is No Longer a Morale Problem, It's a Reliability Risk and a System Failure

For years, production operations teams have treated alert fatigue as a quality-of-life problem: something that makes on-call rotations miserable but isn't considered a direct contributor to outages. That framing doesn't capture how these systems fail, and we now have data to show why. More importantly, it's now clear alert fatigue is a symptom of a deeper issue: production systems have outgrown the current operational approaches ...

Most Enterprises Think They Can Switch AI Vendors in a Month ... Most Who've Tried Couldn't

I was on a customer call last fall when an enterprise architect said something I haven't been able to shake. Her team had just spent four months trying to swap one AI vendor for another. The original plan said three weeks. "We didn't switch vendors," she told me. "We rebuilt half our integrations and discovered what we'd actually been depending on." Most enterprise leaders don't expect that to be the experience ...

Your Observability Stack Has a Telemetry Pipeline Problem

Ask any senior SRE or platform engineer what keeps them up at night, and the answer probably isn't the monitoring tool — it's the data feeding it. The proliferation of APM, observability, and AIOps platforms has created a telemetry sprawl problem that most teams manage reactively rather than architect proactively. Metrics are going to one platform. Traces routed somewhere else. Logs duplicated across multiple backends because nobody wants to be caught without them when something breaks. Every redundant stream costs money ...

Operator to Orchestrator: 80% of IT Pros See Shift in Role as AI Permeates Workflows

80% of respondents agree that the IT role is shifting from operators to orchestrators, according to the 2026 IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous IT from SolarWinds ...

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

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 24: Network Observability Tool Sprawl

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

Capacity Isn't a Guess: Observability-Driven Sizing for On-Prem Databases

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

5 Security Principles Every Entrepreneur Should Apply to Leadership

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...

Signs It May Be Time to Reassess Your IT Infrastructure Strategy

Many organizations assumed their infrastructure strategy was settled. It had been implemented, optimized and built into long-term plans. Recent changes in technology and vendor consolidation are forcing a second look. Cloud outages and licensing changes have exposed how much dependency exists on a small number of platforms. As a result, organizations are reevaluating whether those decisions still hold up under current conditions ...

Enterprise Edge AI Reaches Inflection Point

Edge AI is strategically embedded in core IT and infrastructure spending across industries, according to the 2026 Edge AI Survey from ZEDEDA. The research shows that 83% of C-suite and IT executive respondents say edge AI is important to their core business strategy ...

AI Is Hitting Operational Limits

As AI adoption accelerates, operational complexity — not model intelligence — is becoming the primary barrier to reliable AI at scale, according to the State of AI Engineering 2026 from Datadog ... The report highlights a compounding complexity challenge as AI systems scale ... Around 5% of AI model requests fail in production, with nearly 60% of those failures caused by capacity limits ...

Alert Fatigue Is No Longer a Morale Problem, It's a Reliability Risk and a System Failure

For years, production operations teams have treated alert fatigue as a quality-of-life problem: something that makes on-call rotations miserable but isn't considered a direct contributor to outages. That framing doesn't capture how these systems fail, and we now have data to show why. More importantly, it's now clear alert fatigue is a symptom of a deeper issue: production systems have outgrown the current operational approaches ...

Most Enterprises Think They Can Switch AI Vendors in a Month ... Most Who've Tried Couldn't

I was on a customer call last fall when an enterprise architect said something I haven't been able to shake. Her team had just spent four months trying to swap one AI vendor for another. The original plan said three weeks. "We didn't switch vendors," she told me. "We rebuilt half our integrations and discovered what we'd actually been depending on." Most enterprise leaders don't expect that to be the experience ...

Your Observability Stack Has a Telemetry Pipeline Problem

Ask any senior SRE or platform engineer what keeps them up at night, and the answer probably isn't the monitoring tool — it's the data feeding it. The proliferation of APM, observability, and AIOps platforms has created a telemetry sprawl problem that most teams manage reactively rather than architect proactively. Metrics are going to one platform. Traces routed somewhere else. Logs duplicated across multiple backends because nobody wants to be caught without them when something breaks. Every redundant stream costs money ...

Operator to Orchestrator: 80% of IT Pros See Shift in Role as AI Permeates Workflows

80% of respondents agree that the IT role is shifting from operators to orchestrators, according to the 2026 IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous IT from SolarWinds ...