Companies and Developers Using OpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry is the CNCF observability standard for traces, metrics, and logs, formed by merging OpenTracing and OpenCensus and now adopted by AWS, Splunk, Microsoft, and Datadog.
By the numbers
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| GitHub stars | 6.9k |
| Forks | 2k |
| Contributors | 583+ |
| Latest release | Apr 2026 |
Source: GitHub · fetched 2026-04-17
What is OpenTelemetry?
OpenTelemetry (OTel) is an observability framework released in 2019 as the merger of OpenTracing and OpenCensus. It is Apache 2.0 licensed and incubating under the CNCF, though several of its components are already stable. OTel defines a vendor-neutral API and SDK for emitting traces, metrics, and logs from application code, plus the OpenTelemetry Collector—a pipeline process for receiving, processing, and exporting telemetry to any backend.
The appeal is simple: instrument once in OTel, send to any backend—Datadog, New Relic, Honeycomb, Grafana, Splunk, Dynatrace, AWS X-Ray, or your own Prometheus + Tempo stack. Every major APM vendor now ships native OTel support because their customers demand it. The OTel Collector is quickly becoming the default telemetry pipeline in cloud-native deployments.
Who uses OpenTelemetry?
Production OpenTelemetry deployments include AWS, Microsoft, Splunk, Datadog, Red Hat, Honeycomb, Shopify, Uber, Lyft, and most cloud-native engineering orgs. Every major observability vendor ships first-party OTel instrumentation, and most new instrumentation work in the industry targets OTel rather than vendor-specific agents.
OTel users are backend engineers who add instrumentation, platform engineers who run the Collector, SREs who route telemetry to backends, and observability engineers who own the overall pipeline. These personas buy APM (Datadog, New Relic), trace storage (Tempo, Jaeger), log aggregation (Loki, Splunk), and metric storage (Prometheus, Mimir)—the full observability stack.
According to the OpenTelemetry README: “OpenTelemetry provides a collection of APIs, SDKs, and tools to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data.” (source)
How to reach developers using OpenTelemetry
If you sell a tool that integrates with OpenTelemetry, complements it, or competes with it, the developers contributing to it are your buyers. They’re the ones evaluating tools in your category right now.
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Frequently asked questions about OpenTelemetry
What companies use OpenTelemetry?
OpenTelemetry is used in production at Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Shopify, Uber, and every major observability vendor — OpenTelemetry is the vendor-neutral standard for telemetry data collection.
Who maintains OpenTelemetry?
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), where OpenTelemetry is a graduated project. It was formed from the merger of OpenCensus (Google) and OpenTracing (CNCF). Governed by a Technical Committee with representatives from dozens of companies.
What are alternatives to OpenTelemetry?
Vendor-specific agents (Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace), Prometheus (metrics-only), Jaeger (tracing-only), and pre-OTel proprietary SDKs. OpenTelemetry is generally the recommended path forward for new instrumentation rather than an alternative.
How many developers contribute to OpenTelemetry?
OpenTelemetry has 583 contributors (GitHub, 2026/04). It is one of the more actively contributed open-source projects in its category, with contributions from both individual developers and corporate engineering teams.
Is OpenTelemetry production-ready?
Yes. OpenTelemetry is production-ready: it has 6.9k GitHub stars, 583 contributors (GitHub, 2026/04), and is last released Apr 2026. It is used in production at large-scale organizations and has a mature release cadence.
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