https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/Recent content in Blog on OpenTelemetryHugoen-UShttps://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/stable-declarative-config/Thu, 05 Mar 2026 15:01:29 -0600https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/stable-declarative-config/<h2 id="what-happened">What happened?<a class="td-heading-self-link" href="#what-happened" aria-label="Heading self-link"></a></h2> <p>Key portions of the <a href="https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/docs/specs/otel/configuration/#declarative-configuration">declarative configuration specification</a> have been marked stable, including</p> <ul> <li>The JSON schema for the data model, as defined in <a href="https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-configuration" target="_blank" rel="noopener" class="external-link">opentelemetry-configuration</a> which released a stable <code>1.0.0</code> release</li> <li>The YAML representation of the data model in files (<a href="https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/docs/specs/otel/configuration/data-model/#yaml-file-format">spec link</a>)</li> <li>The in-memory representation of the data model (<a href="https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/docs/specs/otel/configuration/sdk/#in-memory-configuration-model">spec link</a>)</li> <li>The generic representation of a YAML mapping node, <code>ConfigProperties</code> (<a href="https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/docs/specs/otel/configuration/api/#configprovider">spec link</a>)</li> <li>The mechanism for referencing custom plugin components in the data model, <code>PluginComponentProvider</code> (<a href="https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/docs/specs/otel/configuration/sdk/#plugincomponentprovider">spec link</a>)</li> <li>The SDK operations for parsing a YAML file and instantiating SDK components, <code>Parse</code> and <code>Create</code> (<a href="https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/docs/specs/otel/configuration/sdk/#sdk-operations">spec link</a>)</li> <li>The standard env var to indicate that declarative config should be used and to point to the path of a config file <code>OTEL_CONFIG_FILE</code> (<a href="https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/docs/specs/otel/configuration/sdk-environment-variables/#declarative-configuration">spec link</a>)</li> </ul> <h2 id="whats-the-status-of-language-implementations">What&rsquo;s the status of language implementations?<a class="td-heading-self-link" href="#whats-the-status-of-language-implementations" aria-label="Heading self-link"></a></h2> <p>As of now, there are implementations available in five languages:</p>https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/kubecon-eu/Wed, 04 Mar 2026 01:17:41 +0800https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/kubecon-eu/<p>The OpenTelemetry project maintainers, members of the governance committee, and technical committee are thrilled to be at <a href="https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" class="external-link">KubeCon EU</a> in Amsterdam from March 23 - 26, 2026. <a href="https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe/register/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" class="external-link">Register</a> today to join us!</p> <p>Read on to learn about all the events related to OpenTelemetry during KubeCon.</p> <h2 id="talks-and-maintainer-sessions">Talks and maintainer sessions<a class="td-heading-self-link" href="#talks-and-maintainer-sessions" aria-label="Heading self-link"></a></h2> <ul> <li> <p><strong><a href="https://kccnceu2026.sched.com/event/2CVxh/we-deleted-our-observability-stack-and-rebuilt-it-with-otel-12-engineers-to-4-at-20k&#43;-clusters-yash-sharma-kunju-perath-digitalocean" target="_blank" rel="noopener" class="external-link">We Deleted Our Observability Stack and Rebuilt It With OTel: 12 Engineers to 4 at 20K+ Clusters</a></strong><br>by Yash Sharma, DigitalOcean; Kunju Perath, DigitalOcean<br> Tuesday March 24, 2026 11:15 - 11:45CET</p>https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/ottl-context-inference-come-to-filterprocessor/Mon, 02 Mar 2026 13:04:59 +0000https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/ottl-context-inference-come-to-filterprocessor/<p>Last year, the OpenTelemetry project introduced <a href="https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2025/ottl-contexts-just-got-easier/">OTTL context inference for the transform processor</a>. The goal was to allow users to write OTTL statements without worrying about internal telemetry contexts.</p> <p>Starting with <strong>collector-contrib v0.146.0</strong>, context inference is available in the <a href="https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/blob/9c4165139f101a43895d9273192ddb9ae3204844/processor/filterprocessor" target="_blank" rel="noopener" class="external-link">Filter Processor</a> through four new top-level config fields: <code>trace_conditions</code>, <code>metric_conditions</code>, <code>log_conditions</code>, and <code>profile_conditions</code>.</p> <p>In this post, we’ll look at what context inference means specifically for filtering: how it simplifies configuration and how evaluation works.</p>https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/hello-from-community-managers/Thu, 26 Feb 2026 10:16:47 -0800https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/hello-from-community-managers/<img src="https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/hello-from-community-managers/cover.webp" alt="Cover image showing the OTel Community Managers"><p>Hi, community! We are your <a href="../new-community-managers/">newly appointed Community Managers</a>. We’ve begun the initial transitional work behind the scenes, and we look forward to seeing more of you all in the very near future (KubeCon EU, anyone?). With great power comes great responsibility, and we want to hear from you as we look into expanding both the project and the community.</p> <p>In the meantime, we wanted to (re-)introduce ourselves, and invite you to connect with us! Feel free to find us over on CNCF’s Slack; for now, you can ping us directly in <a href="https://cloud-native.slack.com/archives/CJFCJHG4Q" target="_blank" rel="noopener" class="external-link">#opentelemetry</a> (we’re working on creating one single @ so you can easily reach all of us).</p>https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2025/contrib-unroll-processor/Tue, 24 Feb 2026 07:56:51 -0500https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2025/contrib-unroll-processor/<p>The idea for unrolling bundled logs inside the OpenTelemetry Collector didn&rsquo;t start with a processor.</p> <p>By &ldquo;unrolling,&rdquo; I mean taking a single log record that contains multiple logical events—for instance, a JSON array with ten log entries—and expanding it into ten separate log records, one for each event. This lets you work with individual log entries rather than bundled payloads.</p> <p>When the Collector SIG first discussed the problem of how to handle logs that contain multiple logical events in a single body, like a JSON array, the initial instinct was to solve it with an <a href="https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/issues/41791" target="_blank" rel="noopener" class="external-link">OTTL (OpenTelemetry Transform Language) function inside the transform processor</a>.</p>https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2025/stability-proposal-announcement/Tue, 24 Feb 2026 07:56:51 -0500https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2025/stability-proposal-announcement/<h2 id="summary">Summary<a class="td-heading-self-link" href="#summary" aria-label="Heading self-link"></a></h2> <p>OpenTelemetry is, by any metric, one of the largest and most exciting projects in the cloud native space. Over the past five years, this community has come together to build one of the most essential observability projects in history. We&rsquo;re not resting on our laurels, though. The project consistently seeks out, and listens to, feedback from a wide array of stakeholders. What we&rsquo;re hearing from you is that in order to move to the next level, we need to adjust our priorities and focus on stability, reliability, and organization of project releases and artifacts like documentation and examples.</p>https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2025/deprecating-zipkin-exporters/Tue, 24 Feb 2026 07:56:51 -0500https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2025/deprecating-zipkin-exporters/<p>The OpenTelemetry project is deprecating the Zipkin exporter specification in favor of <a href="https://github.com/openzipkin-contrib/zipkin-otel" target="_blank" rel="noopener" class="external-link">Zipkin&rsquo;s OTLP ingestion support</a>.</p> <p>Thank you to all Zipkin contributors for helping OpenTelemetry reach this milestone!</p> <p>After analyzing usage patterns across language ecosystems, we&rsquo;ve observed that the community has strongly gravitated toward OTLP, with Zipkin exporters seeing limited adoption — in several languages, even less than the already-deprecated Jaeger exporter. Combined with minimal user engagement on related issues and the availability of alternatives, we believe this is the right time to sunset Zipkin exporters in OTel SDKs.</p>https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2025/declarative-config-rc3/Tue, 24 Feb 2026 07:56:51 -0500https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2025/declarative-config-rc3/<p>The <a href="https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-configuration/releases/tag/v1.0.0-rc.3" target="_blank" rel="noopener" class="external-link">latest release</a> of the OpenTelemetry Configuration Schema is out this week. It brings the Configuration working group one step closer to completion after 3 years of effort, and the schema one step closer to being marked stable. We might be optimists here, but we think this may be the last release candidate before a stable release is done.</p> <p>Many of the changes in the repositories since the previous release involved improvements to the tooling, to make the schema more consistent, and reduce the chances for new inconsistencies to be introduced in the future. There are other changes impacting both end users, contributors to the configuration schema, and implementers of the schema.</p>https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/2025-year-in-review/Tue, 24 Feb 2026 07:56:51 -0500https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/2025-year-in-review/<p>As 2025 has come to an end, we&rsquo;re taking a moment to look back at everything the community accomplished across the website, documentation, and localization efforts. The year was another exciting chapter for OpenTelemetry.io, and we are thrilled to share some of the highlights with you.</p> <h2 id="highlights-of-2025">Highlights of 2025<a class="td-heading-self-link" href="#highlights-of-2025" aria-label="Heading self-link"></a></h2> <p>Where 2024 introduced the foundation of multilingual documentation, 2025 is when localization became a core pillar of OpenTelemetry.io. This means more contributors, more translations, more supported languages, and more visibility for localized content.</p>https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/demystifying-opentelemetry/Tue, 24 Feb 2026 07:56:51 -0500https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/demystifying-opentelemetry/<p>For decades, traditional technology environments, ranging from on-premises data centers to legacy applications and industrial control systems, have powered the core of many organizations. These systems are battle-tested and deeply woven into business operations, but they also present unique challenges when it comes to modernizing IT practices, especially observability.</p> <p><strong>Challenges of implementing observability in traditional environments:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Noisy, unstructured logs make it hard to extract meaningful information.</li> <li>Siloed monitoring data across different tools or systems leads to fragmented visibility.</li> <li>Limited instrumentation in legacy apps and systems hinders collection of modern metrics and traces.</li> <li>Teams are often concerned about the potential performance impact from adding new observability tooling.</li> <li>Bridging legacy protocols or hardware with modern platforms can be difficult to integrate.</li> </ul> <p>To make this practical, let’s follow a fictional manufacturing company with a busy production line. Here, a fleet of robotic arms equipped with sensors reports operational data via MQTT to a central broker. A legacy application logs production events and errors to disk, while a collection of SQL Servers and Windows machines support production, analytics, and inventory. Sound familiar? This is the reality for many organizations trying to bridge the old and new worlds.</p>https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/new-community-managers/Fri, 06 Feb 2026 12:09:03 -0500https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/new-community-managers/<p>Back in October 2022, I wrote about <a href="https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2022/announcing-community-manager/">becoming OpenTelemetry&rsquo;s first community manager</a>. At the time, the project had just over 5000 contributors. Since then, those numbers have grown considerably &ndash; almost 20,000 people have contributed to the project! As our community grows, the role and scope of community management must grow with it.</p> <p>Community management matters a lot in open source, and while I&rsquo;m proud of what we&rsquo;ve accomplished together over the past few years, I&rsquo;ve reached a point where I can no longer dedicate the time and focus this work demands. The role deserves someone who can give it their full attention.</p>https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/otel-collector-follow-up-survey-analysis/Wed, 28 Jan 2026 19:23:38 +0100https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/otel-collector-follow-up-survey-analysis/<p>In 2024, the End User SIG conducted a <a href="https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2024/otel-collector-survey/">Collector Survey</a> to gather feedback on how the <a href="https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/docs/collector/">OpenTelemetry Collector</a> is used in practice and the user experience. Insights from that survey informed several development and prioritization decisions within the community.</p> <p>As a follow-up, we conducted another survey in 2025 to understand how deployment practices, usage patterns, and implementation challenges have evolved since then. This blog post presents an analysis of the results, highlighting notable changes compared to the previous year.</p>https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/log-deduplication-processor/Mon, 26 Jan 2026 18:47:07 -0500https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/log-deduplication-processor/<img src="https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/log-deduplication-processor/cover.png" alt="Cover image showing log deduplication concept"><p>Your logs are probably at least 80% repetitive noise. Connection retries, health checks, heartbeat messages: the same log line repeated thousands of times per minute. You pay storage costs for each one while the signal drowns in noise. The OpenTelemetry Collector&rsquo;s log deduplication processor offers an elegant solution to this problem.</p> <h2 id="the-repetitive-log-problem">The repetitive log problem<a class="td-heading-self-link" href="#the-repetitive-log-problem" aria-label="Heading self-link"></a></h2> <p>Modern distributed systems generate enormous volumes of logs, but much of that volume provides diminishing returns. Consider a typical microservice that logs connection errors when a downstream dependency is unavailable. If the service retries every 100 milliseconds for 30 seconds, that&rsquo;s 300 nearly identical log entries for a single incident. Each entry consumes storage, network bandwidth, and processing capacity in your logging backend.</p>https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/obi-goals/Fri, 23 Jan 2026 07:56:48 -0800https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/obi-goals/<p>As we kick off 2026, the <a href="https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/docs/zero-code/obi/">OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation</a> SIG has come together to set an ambitious roadmap for the year. Our focus is on achieving production readiness with a stable 1.0 release while expanding protocol and language support to serve a broader range of use cases. We&rsquo;re also strengthening integration with OpenTelemetry APIs and SDKs to support hybrid instrumentation approaches. For those new to OBI, check out the documentation link above to learn more about zero-code observability using eBPF.</p>https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/dapr-workflow-observability/Wed, 21 Jan 2026 20:54:34 +0100https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/dapr-workflow-observability/<p>This post tells the story of how contributors from across the cloud native community worked together to enhance <a href="https://dapr.io/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" class="external-link">Dapr</a>&rsquo;s OpenTelemetry integration, particularly around asynchronous workflows. It also highlights the ongoing effort to align Dapr with the OpenTelemetry semantic conventions using <a href="https://github.com/open-telemetry/weaver" target="_blank" rel="noopener" class="external-link">OpenTelemetry Weaver</a>, and explores how this collaboration can serve as a useful example for other CNCF projects. None of this work started as a formal initiative. It emerged through discussion, experimentation, and a shared goal of making telemetry easier to understand and more consistent across the ecosystem.</p>https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/oteljs-nodejs-dos-mitigation/Thu, 15 Jan 2026 16:35:52 -0500https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/oteljs-nodejs-dos-mitigation/<p>You may have seen a recent Node.js security advisory and related coverage discussing a potential denial-of-service issue involving <code>async_hooks</code>. OpenTelemetry (and other APM tools) were mentioned because we rely on <code>AsyncLocalStorage</code> for context propagation.</p> <p>To be clear: <strong>this is not a bug or vulnerability in OpenTelemetry</strong>. The issue ultimately lies in applications and frameworks that rely on unspecified stack space exhaustion behavior for availability. In Node.js versions before 24.x, <code>AsyncLocalStorage</code> is implemented on top of <code>async_hooks</code>, which - when combined with this unsafe assumption — made the edge case easier to reproduce.</p>https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2025/calling-new-contributors/Wed, 14 Jan 2026 17:39:49 -0500https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2025/calling-new-contributors/<div class="td-alert td-alert--md alert alert-note" role="alert"><div class="td-alert-heading alert-heading" role="heading">Update as of 2025-12-08</div> <div class="td-alert-body"> <p>A giant thank you to those of you who have volunteered to participate! We have received more interest than expected, so sign-ups are closed for now. Stay tuned to the OpenTelemetry blog for more feedback opportunities in the future.</p> </div> </div> <p>If you&rsquo;ve ever thought about contributing to OpenTelemetry but weren&rsquo;t sure where to start, you&rsquo;re not alone. In a <a href="https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2025/contribex-survey-results/">recent community</a> survey, we heard that people were excited to contribute but got stuck taking those first steps. Contributing to open source can feel daunting, and we want to change that.</p>https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2025/community-awards-winners/Wed, 14 Jan 2026 07:44:34 -0500https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2025/community-awards-winners/<p>We are excited to announce the winners of the second <strong>OpenTelemetry Community Awards</strong>! These awards recognize individuals who have made a notable impact to the OpenTelemetry project over the past year, whether it&rsquo;s through code, documentation, project management, outreach, adoption, or simply helping others answer technical questions on our <a href="https://slack.cncf.io/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" class="external-link">CNCF Slack</a>. We received many nominations from the community, and we are delighted to share the winners with you.</p> <p>Let&rsquo;s congratulate our 2025 OpenTelemetry Community Awards winners:</p>https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/slack-community-insights/Wed, 07 Jan 2026 18:47:50 +0100https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/slack-community-insights/<img src="https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2026/slack-community-insights/cover.png" alt="Cover image showing Slack message volume over time"><p>The OpenTelemetry community has grown tremendously over the past few years, and with that growth comes valuable insights hidden in our community conversations. We analyzed nearly 10,000 messages from the <a href="https://cloud-native.slack.com/archives/C01N6P7KR6W" target="_blank" rel="noopener" class="external-link"><code>#otel-collector</code></a> and <a href="https://cloud-native.slack.com/archives/CJFCJHG4Q" target="_blank" rel="noopener" class="external-link"><code>#opentelemetry</code></a> channels on <a href="https://slack.cncf.io/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" class="external-link">CNCF Slack</a> spanning from May 2019 to December 2025 to understand what challenges users face most often, which components generate the most discussion, and where the community might need additional documentation or tooling improvements.</p>https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2025/otca-for-newcomers-and-advanced-users/Thu, 20 Nov 2025 20:06:54 -0500https://deploy-preview-9173--opentelemetry.netlify.app/blog/2025/otca-for-newcomers-and-advanced-users/<p>In the IT industry, certifications often generate debate – some regard them as essential career milestones, while others question their practical value. While OpenTelemetry is getting widely adopted, not everyone is aware that there is a dedicated certification exam available for OpenTelemetry. The <a href="https://training.linuxfoundation.org/certification/opentelemetry-certified-associate-otca/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" class="external-link">OpenTelemetry Certified Associate (OTCA)</a> exam from the <a href="https://www.linuxfoundation.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" class="external-link">Linux Foundation</a> is a credential designed to validate foundational knowledge and best practices in observability with OpenTelemetry, and its value extends to both newcomers and experienced professionals. This article outlines the structure of the OTCA exam, its relevance for individuals at different stages of their careers, and the benefits of pursuing this certification within the broader observability landscape.</p>