As we roll toward the new year, it’s a great time to reflect on how we can build better observability practices. Join your favorite OTel thought leaders for a lighthearted journey through the past, present, and future of OpenTelemetry. We’ll cover early challenges, key improvements to the spec, tooling, and developer experience, and exciting developments we’re most looking forward to in 2026. 

Topics include: 

• Addressing past pain points with stability improvements and redesigning the Logging API.
• New projects like declarative configuration and Instrumentation Score that make it easier to ensure quality telemetry collection at scale. 
• Existing tools that are ready for big adoption in 2026, like OTel Weaver and OpAMP.
• The future of OTel for frontend, with the Browser SIG and OpenTelemetry on Kotlin Multiplatform. 

We want to hear from you! Send us what you’ve loved most about OpenTelemetry this year, including improvements you want to see, and we’ll dive into them in the panel discussion or during our Q&A section.