It’s time for a fun discussion on what’s truly important this holiday season… OpenTelemetry!

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. 

OpenTelemetry resources mentioned during the panel

• • OTel Kotlin repo (Still in the Embrace repo until the donation is finalized)
  • Life of a Mobile Span (Talk by Hanson Ho at Observability Day North America 2025)
  • Instrumentation Score
  • Declarative config
  • Updates to Logging API 
  • Evolving OpenTelemetry's Stabilization and Release Practices 
  • OTel Arrow 
  • OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation (OBI) 
  • OTel Weaver 
  • We’re past the OpenTelemetry “Honeymoon Period” (Blog by Adriana Villela on 2026 OTel wishlist) 
  • What does ‘good’ telemetry look like? (Blog by Dan Gomez Blanco on telemetry quality) 
  • There’s a Lot of Bad Telemetry Out There (Talk by Dan Gomez Blanco and Juraci Paixão Kröhling at Observability Day North America 2025) 
  • Just Do It: OpAMP (Talk by Panos Tsilopoulos and Bob Johnson at KubeCon North America 2025)