OpenTelemetry and Grafana Labs: what’s new and what’s next in 2025

As the new year rolls in, it’s a great time to reflect and think big. What were some of your notable achievements in 2024, and what are your goals for 2025? We often do this in our personal lives — but why not apply this same line of thinking to observability, as well?

Observability continues to be a hot topic, and OpenTelemetry, in particular, continues to gain some serious momentum. One of the fastest growing open source projects in the cloud native arena, OpenTelemetry saw a 45% YoY increase in code commits on GitHub in 2024, along with a 100% increase in search volume on Google, according to a recent OpenTelemetry report. The open source project was also a popular topic at major industry events, including Monitorama, PromCon, KubeCon North America and Europe, and ObservabilityCON.

Grafana Labs remains fully committed to OpenTelemetry, with several Grafanistas — myself included — actively maintaining and contributing to the project. In the spirit of the new year, let’s take a look back at some of the major ways the OpenTelemetry project evolved last year, and provide a peek at what’s to come in 2025.

Recent OpenTelemetry project milestones

Support for profiling

In 2023, OpenTelemetry achieved stability for logs, metrics, and traces and, in 2024, the OTel community made another major announcement: support for profiling. OpenTelemetry’s profiling signal enables users to easily jump from resource telemetry data to a corresponding profile so they can correlate, for example, a spike in CPU usage to the specific code components consuming that resource.

The new profiles data model is currently stable and is being used to lay the foundation for production-ready implementations.

The Spring Boot starter reaches stability

The Spring Boot starter, which is a powerful tool that simplifies the process of instrumenting Spring Boot applications with OpenTelemetry, is also now stable, making it easier for users to observe their Sprint Boot applications. The main features of the Sprint Boot stable release include out-of-the-box instrumentation, declarative SDK autoconfiguration setup, and programmatic SDK autoconfiguration setup.

Updates to Semantic Conventions

A number of new Semantic Conventions groups emerged in 2024, including those for Databases, Messaging, RPC, System, AI/LLM and Contributor Experience — so we can expect advancements in those areas.

Speaking of Databases, Semantic Conventions are currently being stabilized, and implementations have been created in a few SDKs, including JavaScript SDK with Postgres and .NET SDK with MySQL.

By the way, if you’re interested in any of these areas, please feel free to reach out to the Semantic Conventions groups directly. You can learn more about how to get involved on GitHub.

Datadog receiver updates

Last June, we released new open source code for the OpenTelemetry Datadog receiver that allows users to translate Datadog metric formats into native OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP) format. These metrics can then be sent to any OpenTelemetry-compatible metrics system, whether it’s Prometheus, Grafana Mimir, or another backend database.

We have made this code available and marked it as experimental in Grafana Alloy, our distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector that uniquely provides native pipelines for both OpenTelemetry and Prometheus formats.

Other notable updates and improvements

We’re starting the new year off with more new capabilities in OpenTelemetry.

It’s now possible to collect OTel-compliant Java logs directly from files, which is helpful in scenarios where logs need to be output to files or stdout due to organizational or reliability requirements.

The OTel community announced several other improvements and new features, including:

• Resource detectors for host.id, service.instance.id, service.name, service.version
• The addition of auto-instrumentation for openai-php to help understand the interaction with OpenAI compatible services
• The addition of metrics for Node.js runtime.

Meanwhile, localization teams have been translating the OpenTelemetry website into Chinese, French, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish, making its content more broadly accessible to non-English speakers.

And last, but certainly not least, in 2024 OpenTelemetry applied to become a Graduated CNCF project — a move that emphasizes how much the open source project has matured over the years.

OpenTelemetry at Grafana Labs

According to the results of our second annual Observability Survey, the vast majority of respondents are adopting multiple observability solutions, with 89% investing in Prometheus and 85% in OpenTelemetry — and 40% in both. Grafana Labs is one of the only companies serving as a leading contributor to both OpenTelemetry and Prometheus, and its engineers have played a pivotal role in the advancement and adoption of these projects.

We continue to focus on building compatibility with both Prometheus and OpenTelemetry into our products and open source projects. Here’s a look at some of the ways we did this with OTel in 2024.

OpenTelemetry + eBPF

In Grafana Beyla, we added generic trace context propagation support for HTTP, so that our eBPF-based auto-instrumentation can work with OTel-instrumented services. We’ve also added support for detecting OTel instrumentation within services to avoid double accounting of telemetry data.

OpenTelemetry Collector + Grafana Alloy

Grafana Alloy now supports numerous OpenTelemetry Collector components, such as the Datadog receiver, the interval processor, and the syslog exporter. These components integrate with new Alloy features, such as live debugging and remote sourcing of configurations with modules.

OpenTelemetry + application observability

Grafana Cloud Application Observability, an out-of-the box solution to monitor applications and minimize MTTR (mean time to resolution), natively supports both Prometheus and OpenTelemetry. In 2024, we continued to add new features to Application Observability to help you quickly and easily visualize your data and accelerate root cause analysis. To learn more about these updates, please check out this blog post.

What’s in store for 2025

The year has barely started and the OpenTelemetry community is already thinking of all the new things we want to build!

We hope that with our donation of Beyla eBPF auto-instrumentation tooling to the OpenTelemetry project we can leverage the same technology as the OTel profiler to build easy trace-to-profile correlation — more to come there. We also hope to expand the number of supported protocols by our eBPF instrumentation and provide better language-level support for certain programming languages.

This year we’re also expecting OpenTelemetry Collector to be marked as stable, with its v1 release. This will increase overall adoption of the collector, as well as signal that the community can provide long-term support and not introduce backwards-incompatible changes on minor versions.

Meanwhile, in 2025, Grafana Labs will continue to focus on driving collaboration and innovation within the broader OpenTelemetry community. Stay tuned for more!