CNCF Graduates OpenTelemetry as Standard for Observability

Cloud Native Computing Foundation announced in a press release the graduation of OpenTelemetry, marking its readiness for widespread production use as an open source observability framework. OpenTelemetry provides standardized tools to collect, process, and export telemetry data, enabling organizations to change analysis tools without rewriting code.

Formed in 2019 through the merger of OpenTracing and OpenCensus, OpenTelemetry was created to address tool fragmentation and unify observability practices. It now includes APIs, SDKs, a Collector agent, and semantic conventions that allow developers to switch observability backends more easily.

The project has grown to over 12,000 contributors from more than 2,800 companies, achieving the second-highest activity level among over 240 projects in the cloud native ecosystem, behind Kubernetes. Recent updates include support for the Kotlin language and the introduction of Profiles in alpha.

To reach graduation, OpenTelemetry completed an independent security audit and a governance review by the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee. The framework is now widely used by organizations such as Alibaba, Anthropic, Bloomberg, Capital One, and eBay to monitor performance, reliability, and trustworthiness across AI and cloud native systems.