OpenTelemetry Comes of Age: CNCF Graduation, Profiling and…

About this episode

OpenTelemetry has officially reached CNCF graduation this month, marking a major milestone for one of the most widely adopted open observability projects. In this episode of OpenObservability Talks, we unpack what this graduation really means for the project and for users out there. We also revisit the newest observability signal in OpenTelemetry, Continuous Profiling, which was released in public alpha. We explore where the effort currently stands, the adoption and usage best practices. Finally, we dive into the OpenTelemetry eBPF profiling agent and how it aims to dramatically simplify the adoption of continuous profiling for developers and platform teams. Our guest for this episode is Israel Ogbole, CEO & Co-founder of Zymtrace and member of the OTel Profiling SIG. Prior to founding zymtrace, he served as Principal Product Manager at Elastic, where he led Universal Profiling. He also led the donation of Elastic’s eBPF CPU profiler to OpenTelemetry. Israel also worked at Cisco AppDynamics and at Microsoft, with rich background in observability. You can read the recap post: https://medium.com/p/c66dc2cd7d3c Show Notes: 00:00 - episode and guest intro 04:16 - OpenTelemetry reaches CNCF graduation 15:25 - Continuous profiling reaches public Alpha 34:19 - eBPF profiling agent 57:04 - outro Resources: OpenTelemetry reaches CNCF Graduation: https://opentelemetry.io/blog/2026/otel-graduates/ OpenTelemetry Profiles Enters Public Alpha: https://opentelemetry.io/blog/2026/profiles-alpha/ OTel adds the eBPF profiling agent donated by Elastic: https://opentelemetry.io/blog/2024/elastic-contributes-continuous-profiling-agent/ Unveiling OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation: https://medium.com/p/377cb0432bf1 Continuous Profiling: a new observability signal: https://medium.com/p/8afd5bafd498 OTel Profiling SIG established: https://medium.com/p/4a9b407e48cc eBPF for no-code observability instrumentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYDBj5ctKaw&list=PLd57eY2edRXz4djMETYTm-2p8WGTdoX3D Socials: BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/openobservability.bsky.social X (Twitter): ⁠https://x.com/OpenObserv⁠ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/openobservability/ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠ Dotan Horovits ============ X (Twitter): @horovits LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/horovits Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon BlueSky: @horovits.bsky.social Israel Ogbole =========== X (Twitter): https://x.com/israel_ogbole LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/israelo/ OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.