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

Pete Goldin
Editor and Publisher
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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Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

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Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

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

Pete Goldin
Editor and Publisher
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

Hot Topics

The Latest

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...