The State of OpenTelemetry: Insights from OTel Unplugged…

About this episode

February 2026 the OpenTelemetry community gathered at OTel Unplugged event in Brussels. It was the first time this unconference was held in Europe, bringing together maintainers, contributors, governance committee members, and end usersIn this episode our host Dotan Horovits and guest Juraci Paixão Kröhling will discuss their insights from the event about the current state of the project, roadmap, challenges, community and more. Juraci is a software engineer, a Governance Committee member for the OpenTelemetry project, and an emeritus maintainer of the Jaeger project, and the co-founder of OllyGarden, an OpenTelemetry-based startup. You can read the recap post: https://medium.com/p/e00f219f7460/ Show Notes: 00:00 - intro 01:39 - OTel Unplugged background 06:60 - stabilization and graduation 21:49 - OTel blueprints 26:24 - OTel collectors tied to vendors 30:14 - bad telemetry 32:40 - OpenTelemetry-Prometheus compatibility 39:49 - OpenTelemetry Injector 43:07 - OpenTelemetry Weaver 45:33 - Instrumentation Score 51:15 - mobile and browser observability 52:23 - YAML configuration for SDK 55:19 - additional events for OTel community 58:00 - Jaeger v2.15.0 release 1:00:18 - outro Resources: OTel Unplugged: https://opentelemetry.io/blog/2025/otel-unplugged-fosdem/ OTel OBI for eBPF instrumentation: https://medium.com/p/377cb0432bf1 Mobile observability with OTel: https://medium.com/p/2eb847c41941 OTel Injector: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-injector OTel Weaver and Observability by Design approach: https://opentelemetry.io/blog/2025/otel-weaver/ OTel blueprints proposal: https://github.com/open-telemetry/community/pull/3094 Instrumentation Score: https://github.com/instrumentation-score/spec Jaeger v2.15.0 release: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger/releases/tag/v2.15.0 Socials: BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/openobservability.bsky.social X (Twitter): ⁠https://twitter.com/OpenObserv⁠ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/openobservability/ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠ Dotan Horovits ============ Twitter: @horovits LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/horovits Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon BlueSky: @horovits.bsky.social Juraci Paixão Kröhling ================== LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jpkroehling/ 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.