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OpenTelemetry looked increasingly important in 2025 because teams needed a common way to collect telemetry across cloud-native systems, Collector deployments were scaling, and the project was extending its scope into CI/CD. Those signals made it a strong candidate for teams seeking more flexibility in how they instrument and observe software—but they do not prove that every organization adopted it or that it is the best choice for every workload.
Why was OpenTelemetry getting so much attention in 2025?
OpenTelemetry (often shortened to OTel) is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)-hosted open-source project for generating and collecting telemetry. Its stated aim is “high-quality, ubiquitous, and portable telemetry to enable effective observability,” as described on the CNCF OpenTelemetry project page.
The case for its growing importance was a combination of technical need and ecosystem momentum. The reasons below explain why 2025 looked pivotal, while distinguishing what was visible then from evidence reported afterward.
1. Vendor-neutral telemetry became strategically valuable
When application instrumentation is closely tied to one observability vendor, changing backends can mean reworking instrumentation as well as migrating stored data and dashboards. OpenTelemetry offers a different approach: teams can instrument applications using shared conventions and send telemetry to compatible backends, preserving more choice at the instrumentation layer.
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That portability does not eliminate every switching cost. Backend-specific dashboards, queries, features, and data formats may still need work, and a team must still choose how to collect, route, and retain its telemetry. But keeping instrumentation less dependent on a single vendor can give organizations more room to evaluate backends or use different ones for different needs. The CNCF describes its support as helping OpenTelemetry remain open and vendor-neutral.
2. Cloud-native adoption increased the need for a common telemetry layer
As software runs across Kubernetes, virtual machines, and managed services, teams can end up with different monitoring tools and conventions in each environment. A shared instrumentation approach becomes more useful when engineers need to follow behavior across those boundaries.
The CNCF’s 2024 Annual Survey, published April 1, 2025, surveyed 750 community members. In its announcement, the CNCF reported that 89% of surveyed organizations had adopted cloud-native technologies and that 60% used CI/CD for most or all applications. These figures describe the survey respondents and should not be read as global adoption rates. They nevertheless help explain the environment in which a portable telemetry layer was gaining attention.
3. Collector deployments were growing across clusters and virtual machines
The OpenTelemetry Collector is a separate service teams can deploy to receive, process, and export telemetry. It can sit between instrumented applications and observability backends, giving operators a place to manage data flow rather than configuring every application to send data directly to every destination. That flexibility also introduces another component to configure, monitor, and maintain.
An official analysis published by OpenTelemetry in 2026 of its 2025 Collector survey reported that 65% of respondents ran more than 10 Collectors and 81% used Kubernetes. It also found that virtual-machine usage rose from 33% to 51% between the survey periods compared. These are survey findings, not a census of all OpenTelemetry users; they indicate deployments spanning multiple environments rather than a universal pattern.
Operational maturity remained a challenge: about 63% of respondents wanted better configuration management and resolution. Collector scale therefore strengthened the case for OTel while also making clear that teams should plan for configuration ownership and operational support.
4. OpenTelemetry began extending into CI/CD observability
Production telemetry explains what an application did after deployment; CI/CD telemetry can help explain how a change was built, tested, and released. Connecting those signals can help teams investigate whether a deployment or pipeline event is related to a change in runtime behavior.
In 2025, OpenTelemetry documented work on CI/CD observability through OTEP #223 and a dedicated working group under Semantic Conventions. This was a scope-expansion signal, not proof that every pipeline could already be instrumented consistently or that the conventions were complete. Teams considering this use should check the current state of the conventions and the support available in their pipeline tools.
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5. CNCF governance and community activity signaled ecosystem momentum
OpenTelemetry’s CNCF project history records acceptance in 2019 and incubation in 2021. The project page now records graduation in 2026, which is subsequent evidence of maturity and must not be mistaken for its status in 2025. The CNCF’s current project metrics list 26,020 contributors and 4,728 contributing organizations; these are 2026 figures, not 2025 counts.
Other signs of community activity were visible during 2025. A CNCF Observability Summit and an OpenTelemetry Community Day brought maintainers, contributors, and users together. The project’s adopters directory also lists organizations using OpenTelemetry in production or experimentation, while warning that the list is not exhaustive. Taken together, these signals supported the view that OTel was a durable ecosystem effort, rather than a feature belonging to one vendor.
Should your team use OpenTelemetry or a vendor agent?
There is no universal winner. A vendor agent may be simpler to start with when a team has already chosen that vendor and values its integrated setup and support. OpenTelemetry may be a better fit when the team wants shared instrumentation conventions, flexibility in backend choice, or one collection approach across a mixed environment. The Collector can add useful control over telemetry flow, but it also adds deployment and configuration work.
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Use these questions to make the decision concrete:
- How much flexibility do you need? Consider whether future backend changes or multiple destinations are realistic requirements, rather than assuming portability alone makes migration effortless.
- What must you instrument? Check language and runtime coverage, and whether your priorities include traces, metrics, logs, or CI/CD signals. Confirm that the relevant instrumentation and semantic conventions meet your needs.
- Who will operate collection? Decide whether application teams or a central platform team will own Collector deployment, configuration, upgrades, and troubleshooting.
- What does the backend provide? Compare the actual query, alerting, retention, support, and cost-control capabilities you need. The evidence here does not establish a universal cost or performance advantage for OpenTelemetry.
- How will you start safely? Pilot a representative service and telemetry path, validate the data in the intended backend, and document ownership and rollback steps before expanding.
What 2025 does—and does not—establish
The adoption, deployment, scope, and community signals explain why OpenTelemetry looked poised for a larger role in 2025. They do not establish a single global market-share figure for that year, show that all organizations adopted it, or prove that it outperforms vendor-specific agents in every setting. The most defensible conclusion is narrower: OpenTelemetry was becoming an increasingly relevant option for teams that valued shared instrumentation and wanted to manage telemetry across complex environments.
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