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The OpenTelemetry Getting Started Survey: Understanding Users' Observability Journeys

Ana Margarita Medina
Senior Staff Developer
ServiceNow

Organizations can face significant challenges, ranging from skill development to user adoption, when implementing new technologies. This is particularly evident in the realm of observability, an increasingly critical area for organizations striving to maintain optimal performance and reliability across digital applications. Recently, the OpenTelemetry End-User SIG surveyed more than 100 OpenTelemetry users to learn more about their observability journeys and what resources deliver the most value when establishing an observability practice.

Most respondents have initiated their observability journey, whether they are in the process of standing up an observability practice or are already well-established. Regardless of experience level, there's a clear need for more support and continued education, especially in helping those who are just starting with observability technologies. When asked what resources they wish they had when getting started with OpenTelemetry, more than half (67%) said they wanted comprehensive documentation, quickly followed by reference implementations for instrumentation (65%), and more detailed tutorials (63%).



When getting started with observability, most respondents are working with containerization technologies, with about 80% using Kubernetes and 63% using Docker.


While quite a few languages are used across organizations, more than 50% of respondents utilize JavaScript, Java, Go, and Python.


The majority of respondents stated that Traces Specification, Instrumentation APIs and SDKs, and Metrics Specification are the most important aspects of their OpenTelemetry journeys.


Observability will continue to be a cornerstone for organizations to not only measure and understand application performance, but to also build resilience into technology stacks. It's imperative for leaders to empower their teams with the necessary tools and knowledge, as they play a pivotal role in the successful adoption and implementation of observability practices. By equipping teams with the proper resources, organizations can overcome the common challenges associated with implementing new technologies, ensuring a smoother transition and maximizing the full potential of their observability initiatives.

Ana Margarita Medina is a Senior Staff Developer at ServiceNow

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The OpenTelemetry Getting Started Survey: Understanding Users' Observability Journeys

Ana Margarita Medina
Senior Staff Developer
ServiceNow

Organizations can face significant challenges, ranging from skill development to user adoption, when implementing new technologies. This is particularly evident in the realm of observability, an increasingly critical area for organizations striving to maintain optimal performance and reliability across digital applications. Recently, the OpenTelemetry End-User SIG surveyed more than 100 OpenTelemetry users to learn more about their observability journeys and what resources deliver the most value when establishing an observability practice.

Most respondents have initiated their observability journey, whether they are in the process of standing up an observability practice or are already well-established. Regardless of experience level, there's a clear need for more support and continued education, especially in helping those who are just starting with observability technologies. When asked what resources they wish they had when getting started with OpenTelemetry, more than half (67%) said they wanted comprehensive documentation, quickly followed by reference implementations for instrumentation (65%), and more detailed tutorials (63%).



When getting started with observability, most respondents are working with containerization technologies, with about 80% using Kubernetes and 63% using Docker.


While quite a few languages are used across organizations, more than 50% of respondents utilize JavaScript, Java, Go, and Python.


The majority of respondents stated that Traces Specification, Instrumentation APIs and SDKs, and Metrics Specification are the most important aspects of their OpenTelemetry journeys.


Observability will continue to be a cornerstone for organizations to not only measure and understand application performance, but to also build resilience into technology stacks. It's imperative for leaders to empower their teams with the necessary tools and knowledge, as they play a pivotal role in the successful adoption and implementation of observability practices. By equipping teams with the proper resources, organizations can overcome the common challenges associated with implementing new technologies, ensuring a smoother transition and maximizing the full potential of their observability initiatives.

Ana Margarita Medina is a Senior Staff Developer at ServiceNow

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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 ...

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 ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

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

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 ...

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 ...