What OpenTelemetry does

OpenTelemetry is a vendor-neutral, open-source observability framework governed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) that provides a unified set of APIs, SDKs, instrumentation libraries, and a Collector for capturing distributed traces, metrics, and logs from cloud-native applications. Formed in 2019 through the merger of the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects and achieving CNCF graduated status in May 2026, the project is built around the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP), a wire-format standard supported natively by Microsoft Azure Monitor, Amazon CloudWatch, and Google Cloud Observability. The portfolio includes language-specific SDKs for 12+ programming languages (Java, Kotlin, Python, Go, JavaScript, .NET, Ruby, PHP, Rust, C++, Swift, Erlang), the OpenTelemetry Collector with 200+ processing components, the OTel Operator for Kubernetes, auto-instrumentation agents, Profiles for continuous profiling, OTel Weaver for schema management, and the Blueprints enterprise deployment guidance program. The ecosystem encompasses 1,011+ integrations and 102+ vendors, with adoption by 2,800+ organizations including Shopify, eBay, GitHub, Alibaba, Mercado Libre, Skyscanner, Adobe, Heroku, UiPath, Zalando, and VTEX.

The business model is non-commercial: OpenTelemetry is distributed free of charge under the Apache 2.0 license and does not generate direct revenue. The project is sustained by CNCF governance, a Technical Committee, and contributions from member organizations and 12,000+ individual contributors, with cloud provider integrations (Azure, AWS, Google Cloud) functioning as force multipliers for distribution. Target users are cloud-native software developers, DevOps and SRE teams, enterprises standardizing observability tooling, and AI/ML developers seeking instrumentation for LLM and agent workloads; named customer segments are horizontal rather than vertical-specific. Go-to-market is community-led, relying on organic developer adoption, KubeCon and CNCF ecosystem events, Slack community engagement, technical documentation, and cloud provider co-marketing rather than traditional sales channels.

The company is structured as a CNCF project under the Linux Foundation, not a traditional corporation; it has 1-10 core maintainers, no equity, no funding rounds, and a governance committee overseeing technical direction. Recent strategic emphasis has been on AI/agent observability, mobile and edge runtime coverage (Kotlin Multiplatform, eBPF-based auto-instrumentation), enterprise deployment enablement (Blueprints), and schema governance (Weaver), positioning the project as the de facto observability standard across the cloud-native ecosystem.

Name

OpenTelemetry

Legal name

OpenTelemetry Authors

Website

https://opentelemetry.io

Company type

Private

Founded year

2019

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

1–10 employees

Short description

OpenTelemetry is a CNCF-governed open-source observability framework providing vendor-neutral APIs, SDKs, the OTLP wire protocol, and a Collector for distributed traces, metrics, and logs. Used by 2,800+ organizations including Shopify, eBay, GitHub, and Alibaba; distributed free under Apache 2.0 with no direct commercial revenue.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Headquarters

HQ city

Chicago

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Personnel, Technology or R&D, Operations

Revenue model

1. Open Source / No Direct Revenue: OpenTelemetry is a free, open-source observability framework governed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The project does not generate direct revenue as it is freely available for all users. The initiative is sustained through contributions from member organizations and cloud provider support.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion1 record

Distribution channels5 records

Marketing channels5 records

Core offering

OpenTelemetry is an open-source, vendor-neutral observability framework that provides APIs, SDKs, and a Collector for generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry data (traces, metrics, and logs) from cloud-native software. The framework standardizes instrumentation across multiple programming languages via the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) and is distributed free under the Apache 2.0 license.

Product overview

OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework for cloud-native software, providing a set of vendor-neutral APIs, SDKs, agents, and collector services to capture distributed traces, metrics, and logs. Formed in 2019 through the merger of OpenTracing and OpenCensus, and graduated by CNCF in May 2026, the project enables organizations to instrument code once and export telemetry data to any observability backend without vendor lock-in. The portfolio includes language-specific SDKs for 12+ programming languages (Java, Kotlin, Python, Go, JavaScript, .NET, Ruby, PHP, Rust, C++, Swift, Erlang), the OpenTelemetry Collector with 200+ components for processing and routing telemetry, the OTLP wire protocol standard, and supporting tools such as the OTel Operator for Kubernetes, OTel Weaver for schema management, Blueprints for enterprise deployment guidance, and auto-instrumentation agents. The ecosystem encompasses over 1011 integrations and 102 vendors. Observability signals include traces, metrics, logs, and baggage with unified context propagation across distributed systems.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• OpenTelemetry SDKs Language-specific Software Development Kits that provide the APIs and instrumentation libraries developers use to generate and emit traces, metrics, and logs from their applications. Targets application developers and platform engineers building cloud-native services.
• OpenTelemetry Collector A standalone, vendor-agnostic service that receives, processes (filters, transforms, batches), and exports telemetry data to multiple backends. Used by operators and platform teams to centralize and route observability data.
• OpenTelemetry Operator A Kubernetes Operator that automates deployment, configuration, and management of the OpenTelemetry Collector and auto-instrumentation workloads on Kubernetes clusters. Targets platform and SRE teams running Kubernetes.
• OpenTelemetry Weaver A standalone tool for authoring, validating, and managing OpenTelemetry semantic conventions and telemetry schemas in a code-first workflow. Used by instrumentation authors and observability platform engineers.

Quantifiable outcome

• Second-highest project velocity among CNCF projects

Named customers9 records

Segments4 records

Ideal customer profiles3 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

Yes

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Integration5 records

AI capability6 records

Feature5 records

Partnerships

Eight partnerships are on record, tiered core and minor.

• Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)coreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 May 2026The CNCF is the governing foundation for OpenTelemetry. As a CNCF graduated project, OpenTelemetry operates under the foundation's governance, marketing support, and ecosystem development programs. The CNCF provides the infrastructure for community collaboration, events, and project promotion.
• Microsoft AzurecoreTechnology or IntegrationMicrosoft Azure has built native OpenTelemetry Protocol support into Azure Monitor and other Azure services. This partnership enables Azure customers to easily instrument their applications using OpenTelemetry standards and export telemetry data to Azure backends.
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)coreTechnology or IntegrationAWS has integrated OpenTelemetry Protocol support across its cloud services including CloudWatch and X-Ray. This enables AWS customers to leverage OpenTelemetry instrumentation while using AWS-native observability backends.
• Google CloudcoreTechnology or IntegrationGoogle Cloud provides native OpenTelemetry support through its Cloud Operations suite. This partnership allows Google Cloud customers to adopt OpenTelemetry standards for instrumentation while maintaining integration with Google's observability tools.
• EmbraceminorStrategic or Co-development PartnerEmbrace contributed the Kotlin API and SDK for OpenTelemetry, providing native support for Android and Kotlin-based applications. This contribution extends OpenTelemetry's reach into the mobile application development space.
• AdobeminorStrategic or Co-development PartnerAdobe contributed reference implementations for the OpenTelemetry Blueprints initiative, demonstrating best practices for implementing OpenTelemetry in production enterprise environments.
• MastodonminorStrategic or Co-development PartnerMastodon contributed reference implementations for the OpenTelemetry Blueprints initiative, providing examples of open-source social media platform observability implementations.
• SkyscannerminorStrategic or Co-development PartnerSkyscanner contributed reference implementations for the OpenTelemetry Blueprints initiative and is an active user of OpenTelemetry for observability across their travel platform.

Scale indicators4 records

Recent moves7 records

Expansion highlights6 records

Direct peers

• Prometheus: CNCF graduated project focused on metrics collection, monitoring, and alerting. Highly complementary to OpenTelemetry, with overlapping use cases in cloud-native observability and shared contributor ecosystems; both compete for the telemetry-substrate layer.
• Jaeger: CNCF graduated distributed tracing system originally incubated alongside OpenTracing. Directly comparable as an open-source tracing framework, and is now increasingly positioned as an OTel-compatible backend rather than an instrumentation alternative.
• Fluentd: CNCF graduated unified logging layer. Comparable as a CNCF observability substrate that handles collection and routing of telemetry signals (specifically logs) to multiple backends, paralleling OTel's collector architecture.

Broad incumbents

• Grafana: Commercial open-source observability platform (LGTM stack: Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir). Comparable as a broader observability vendor that natively integrates with OTel as a data source while competing for backend and visualization workloads.
• Datadog: Commercial cloud monitoring and observability platform with proprietary tracing, metrics, and logs agents. Comparable as a leading APM vendor whose proprietary agents compete with OTel instrumentation; Datadog also contributes to OTel (e.g., Go compile-time instrumentation).
• New Relic: Commercial observability platform with full-stack APM, infrastructure monitoring, and logs. Comparable as an enterprise observability incumbent whose proprietary agents compete with OTel, while also ingesting OTLP from OTel-instrumented applications.
• Dynatrace: Enterprise observability and APM platform with its OneAgent instrumentation. Comparable as a commercial incumbent whose proprietary auto-instrumentation competes with OTel SDKs and Collector, particularly in large enterprises.
• Splunk: Enterprise observability, logging, and SIEM platform (now part of Cisco). Comparable as a backend observability destination that ingests OTLP, while also competing via its OpenTelemetry distributions and instrumentation tooling.
• Elastic: Search and observability vendor behind the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana). Comparable as an observability backend that natively ingests OTel signals and competes in logs, metrics, and APM.

Emerging players

• Zipkin: Open-source distributed tracing system predating OTel. Comparable as an open-source tracing framework whose instrumentation has largely been superseded or wrapped by OpenTelemetry in modern cloud-native stacks.

Market position

Strengths4 records

Weaknesses4 records

Competitive moat5 records

Key risks5 records

Key highlights6 records

Customer concentration

• Xx.com/opentelemetry
• GitHubgithub.com/open-telemetry
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/opentelemetry
• Facebookfacebook.com/OpenTelemetry-100081820631840

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles2 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds

Investors

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about OpenTelemetry