OpenTelemetry graduates within the CNCF, seven years after its creation

2026-05-21 · Publisher : CNCF · Domain : Cloud & DevOps

On 21 May 2026, the CNCF announces OpenTelemetry's graduation: more than 12,000 contributors from over 2,800 companies, the CNCF's second-highest velocity after Kubernetes and more than 1.36 billion JavaScript API downloads in twelve months.

### What changes On 21 May 2026, at the Observability Summit in Minneapolis, the CNCF announces the graduation of **OpenTelemetry**, the neutral open source framework that standardizes collecting, processing and exporting metrics, logs and traces. Formed in 2019 by the merger of OpenTracing and OpenCensus with CNCF's help, the project spent seven years in development before reaching the highest level. ### Key facts - More than 12,000 contributors from over 2,800 companies since the project's formation. - Second-highest project velocity among more than 240 ecosystem projects, behind Kubernetes alone. - Over twelve months: more than 1.36 billion downloads of the JavaScript API package and more than 1.3 billion for the Python API package, with monthly records in April 2026. - Signals covered: traces, metrics, logs, and profiles, now officially in alpha; new Kotlin language support. - Integration with the CNCF observability ecosystem: Kubernetes, Fluentd, Jaeger and Prometheus; growing interest in observing AI workloads. ### Why it matters OpenTelemetry is the convergence point of observability: instrument once, switch monitoring vendors without re-instrumenting applications. Graduation backs this choice in tenders where independence from a monitoring vendor is a criterion. For an IT services firm, the value lies in standardizing semantic conventions and the collector; mastering data storage and ingestion cost remains, which the standard does not solve. ### Takeaway OpenTelemetry becomes the de facto open standard for observability, at the CNCF's top maturity level.

Tags : Observabilité, Cloud natif, Open Source, DevOps