Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces OpenTelemetry’s Graduation, Solidifying Status as the De Facto Observability Standard

The milestone for OpenTelemetry reflects widespread production adoption and a stable, vendor-neutral observability standard 

• The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced the graduation of OpenTelemetry, an open source observability framework designed to standardize telemetry data collection and processing, marking its readiness for widespread production use.

• OpenTelemetry solves tool fragmentation and simplifies observability by providing a single standard, allowing organizations to change analysis tools without rewriting code.

• Since the project’s formation, the OpenTelemetry community has over 12,000 contributors from over 2,800 companies.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, announced the graduation of OpenTelemetry, a vendor-neutral, open source observability framework designed to standardize the collection, processing and exporting of telemetry data—specifically metrics, logs and traces.

“As organizations increasingly scale AI and cloud native workloads, real time observability is critical for operational success,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF. “OpenTelemetry’s graduation solidifies it as the essential, unified observability standard, providing the consistent visibility required to understand and oversee complex systems. Since the project’s inception, it has been incredible to witness the sheer growth and adoption OpenTelemetry has had in the cloud native community and beyond. The project creators, maintainers and community members should all be proud of this milestone.”

Formed in 2019 through the assistance of CNCF as a merger between OpenTracing and OpenCensus, OpenTelemetry (OTel) was created to eliminate a community split between the two overlapping projects. This helped solve tool fragmentation by providing a single set of APIs, SDKs, Collector agent, and semantic conventions, thus allowing organizations to switch observability backends without re-instrumenting their entire codebase.

In the seven years since its creation, OpenTelemetry has achieved the second-highest project velocity among over 240 projects in the cloud native ecosystem, second only to Kubernetes, and is widely regarded as the “de facto” standard for open source observability. OpenTelemetry’s rise in CNCF’s project velocity underscores the project’s growth trajectory and how deeply the technology resonates with developers and end users. Today, the project has grown to include over 12,000 contributors from over 2,800 companies and hundreds of maintainers across various language-specific Special Interest Groups (SIGs).

“OpenTelemetry’s graduation is the result of decades of collective effort from individuals, companies, and cloud native practitioners to make observability a built-in part of software,” said Austin Parker, OpenTelemetry governance committee and director of AI strategy, honeycomb.io. “When we launched this project, none of us expected that it would reach this level of popularity and impact. I’m incredibly thankful and indebted to our maintainers and contributors who helped get us to this point as well as the many individuals in the CNCF who have been a part of this journey.”

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The project’s widespread adoption is gaining new interest as a layer to observe performance, reliability, accuracy and trustworthiness in AI workloads. In the past twelve months, the OpenTelemetry JavaScript API package was downloaded more than 1.36 billion times and the OpenTelemetry Python API package surpassed 1.3 billion downloads, with both API packages setting new monthly download records in April 2026. Organizations such as Alibaba, Anthropic, Bloomberg, Capital One, eBay, FICO Software, Heroku and others rely on OpenTelemetry to monitor and secure their systems.

OpenTelemetry continues to focus on its production readiness by recently adding support for new languages such as Kotlin and also promoting Profiles, now officially in alpha. It deeply integrates into the broader CNCF observability ecosystem and works alongside Kubernetes, Fluentd, Jaeger and Prometheus.

To officially achieve graduation, OpenTelemetry successfully engaged in a third-party independent security audit and reviews for core components such as the OpenTelemetry Collector, along with a formal governance review to confirm maturity. The project has also incorporated community feedback into updates to improve its production readiness.

The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) provides technical leadership to the cloud native community, defining its vision and stewarding projects through maturity levels up to graduation. OpenTelemetry’s graduation was supported by TOC sponsors Emily Fox and Davanum Srinivas, who conducted a thorough technical due diligence of the project.