OpenTelemetry has graduated… now what?

Posted on August 31, 2026 by Adriana Villela (OTel Community Manager | OTel End User SIG Maintainer | CNCF Ambassador) and Reese Lee (OTel Community Manager | OTel End User SIG Maintainer) In case you missed it: OpenTelemetry (OTel) has officially achieved CNCF graduated status ! It now stands proudly alongside amazing open source projects such as Kubernetes and Prometheus , to name just a few. It’s been a long journey, and we’re very excited… But, now what? To understand where we’re going, it’s important to understand where we came from. In the not-so-distant past, telemetry signals were not standardized.

This meant telemetry formats differed from tool to tool, with each telemetry vendor creating and maintaining its own instrumentation libraries. Vendor lock-in was a huge problem: If you wanted to switch vendors, you had to strip out the previous vendor’s libraries from your code and replace them with the new vendor’s libraries. As a result, switching vendors was a nontrivial task. In addition, the three core telemetry signals – traces, logs, and metrics – were treated as separate, so there was no easy way to correlate them. Because of this, the observability story was incomplete.

Previous attempts had been made at standardization: the CNCF ’s OpenTracing , and Google’s OpenCensus , forming the basis for what was to become OpenTelemetry. In the interest of having a single standard, OpenCensus and OpenTracing were merged to form OpenTelemetry in May 2019. OpenTelemetry takes the best of both worlds, and then some, providing a tracing, metrics, and logs specification, a set of standardized APIs, and language specific implementations of these APIs, in addition to the Collector . Both OpenCensus and OpenTracing are now officially archived.

OpenTracing was archived in January 2022, and OpenCensus was archived in July 2023. With the backing of all major observability vendors, and an active developer and end user community, OpenTelemetry became the de facto open standard for telemetry. OpenTelemetry is the second-highest velocity project in the CNCF , just behind Kubernetes. According to the CNCF , OpenTelemetry has “over 12,000 contributions, from over 2,800 companies and hundreds of maintainers across various language-specific Special Interest Groups (SIGs). ” Since its inception, traces, logs, and metrics have reached general availability (GA).