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 

Key Highlights:

• 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.

MINNEAPOLIS, May 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- OBSERVABILITY SUMMIT -- The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today 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."

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.

Supporting quotes:

"OpenTelemetry represents a pivot in the industry, from completely siloed, separate signals to a new model: shared telemetry that integrates all sources of telemetry into a single braid of data. This kind of high quality, integrated data is a first in the industry, and as it has become a standard practice, an entire generation of new observability techniques are becoming unlocked. Graduation is the perfect starting gun for this new revolution in observability."  – Ted Young, OpenTelemetry co-creator and developer programs director, Grafana Labs

"OpenTelemetry is an unusual OSS project: rather than being 'a piece of code you run,' it's a set of loosely coupled standards, protocols and libraries that help power mature observability and security practices. It's inspiring to see the near-universal support and compatibility from end-users, vendors and the rest of the cloud native OSS ecosystem: this is a true testament to the many end-users, vendors and partners on related projects who put in the countless hours (and pull requests) to help OTel become what it is today—thank you!" – Ben Sigelman, OpenTelemetry co-creator

"When we founded OpenTelemetry in 2019 I had high expectations, but if someone had told me then that it would have this much of an impact on the industry or grow a community of over 2000 people contributing each quarter, I'd have been very skeptical. OpenTelemetry has become so ubiquitous across the industry, from high-scale Kubernetes deployments, to client and IoT devices that people use every day, and even to decades-old mainframes. OpenTelemetry speaks to the critical challenges it addresses and provides deep operational value to the developers and organizations around the world who use it. Here's to the next seven years!" – Morgan McLean, OpenTelemetry co-creator and senior director of product management, Splunk, a Cisco company

Learn more about OpenTelemetry and join the community: https://opentelemetry.io/

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry's top developers, end users, and vendors and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by nearly 800 members, including the world's largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit www.cncf.io. 

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SOURCE Cloud Native Computing Foundation