The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has voted to accept OpenTelemetry as a CNCF incubating project. OpenTelemetry is an observability framework for cloud native software. It is a collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs that can be used to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data – which includes metrics, logs, and traces – for analysis to better understand software performance and behavior.

To be officially approved as an incubating project, the team added a Status page to clarify the stability around different project components, defined a governance structure, and adhere to the CNCF code of conduct.

The OpenTelemetry project was created through the merger of the OpenCensus and OpenTracing projects in May 2019 and became a CNCF Sandbox project shortly thereafter. Since then, the OpenTelemetry team has built out APIs and SDKs in 11 languages and added full support for metrics and tracing in the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP).

The project has been adopted by many organizations, including F5, Grafana Labs, Shopify, Splunk, and others. Many end users and vendors are running OpenTelemetry in production and at scale. To date, more than 500 developers from 220 companies like Amazon, Dynatrace, Google, Honeycomb, Lightstep, Microsoft, Splunk, Uber, and more contribute to the project.

OpenTelemetry supports interoperability with other CNCF projects, including Fluentd, Jaeger, Prometheus, Cortex, OpenMetrics, and other projects.