Meet Ted Young, OpenTelemetry co-founder and the newest Grafanista

In just a few short years, OpenTelemetry has become the second largest CNCF project behind Kubernetes and is well on its way to becoming an industry standard for collecting and exporting telemetry data. And with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 just around the corner, there’s no one better to talk to about the state of OpenTelemetry than Ted Young.

Ted is the co-founder of OpenTelemetry and serves on the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee. And we’re excited to share that he’s also the newest Grafanista, having joined Grafana Labs this month as Developer Programs Director. 

In this Q&A, you’ll learn more about why Ted joined Grafana Labs and what he hopes to accomplish here. You’ll also find out why he’s so excited about the future of OpenTelemetry, and what he’s most looking forward to at KubeCon. And you’ll even learn a bit about his interests outside of tech, from his early days as an animator to his current work making films inspired by children’s classics like “Labyrinth.”  

How did you get started in tech?

I used to work as an animator, which was a lot of fun. That’s actually where I got involved with computer operations, things like 3D animation and visual effects. It might seem totally separate from internet stuff, but all the operational problems you run into in our world, you run into that world, too. You have these massive server farms that you’re trying to utilize as much as possible, and you have all these independent workloads that are trying to share the same resources. Everything contending with each other and all of the nonsense that comes out of that, and all of the people being like: “Why is it slow? Oh God, why is it slow?!” 

And then I switched to internet stuff and it’s the exact same problem, right? Big systems, all these users trying to use them at once. Everyone is asking: “Why is it slow? Why doesn’t it work?” 

And how did that lead you to OpenTelemetry?

Right before getting into OpenTelemetry, I worked on a product called Cloud Foundry, which is sort of like Heroku meets Kubernetes—so, containers and container scheduling and all of that fun “distributed operating system” stuff, which I still really enjoy. But through all of that, I started to get really frustrated by the tools we were using to observe these systems and debug them. It felt like we didn’t have good tools and we didn’t even have a good model for what good tools would look like. 

And that is what caused me to dive into OpenTracing, which turned into OpenTelemetry. And now I’m coming to Grafana, which in my mind is a company that really has such a great model for how all this stuff should work and fit together.

Tell us more about the journey of OpenTelemetry—where it started and where it is now.

Part of it is just about how we observe our systems. People talk about the “three pillars of observability,” but I don’t like that model because it makes it sound like there was some kind of grand plan. I like to refer to it as the “three browser tabs” of observability because that makes it sound more like what it is, which is this kind of ad hoc thing that grew over time.

The traditional siloed approach is just not a great way to do it because when we actually observe our systems, it’s not like “I have a logging problem, let me go look at my logs.” Or “I have a metrics problem, let me go look at my metrics.” I have a system problem and I need to look at my system, which means I need to take in all of this data and synthesize it. 

I have these workflows as an operator where I’m moving through all of these different tools in order to understand what’s going on. If you want to make that work, then you need the telemetry coming out of these systems to be unified. You need your traces and your metrics and your logs all connected together, so that you can feed it into a backend that synthesizes everything into a holistic view of what’s going on and allows you to move seamlessly across all of these different signals. That’s a well-designed world, one where your tools match what you’re actually trying to do. 

We want to move the industry to this well-designed world because then we can start leveraging machine learning and AI and those sorts of fancy things to take on a lot of the stuff that human brains aren’t very good at. We can use our computers to find correlations as opposed to the old school way, which was to use our eyeballs to look at squiggly lines. You can get really far using eyeballs and squiggly lines, but with a million dollars worth of computers, you can actually get a lot further than that.

You touched on this a little already, but what were your impressions of Grafana Labs before you joined?

One of the main things I notice is Grafana’s commitment to open source. I’ve always worked in open source, and there are some fundamental reasons why certain things should be open source. Some companies adopt open source because they have to, because of those fundamentals, but you have a problem where you go far enough up the food chain in those companies and you start to encounter decision makers who themselves are not particularly familiar with how open source works and how that landscape works and how those communities work. And what’s truly unique about Grafana is you can go all the way to the top of the company and find people who have direct personal experience with open source and really understand it in their bones.

And when you say fundamentals, do you mean just in terms of making things work together or is there more to it than that?

There’s a fundamental shift that’s been going on for a while, which is basically for users, anyone operating software, if they’re going to take a library and compile it into their application, if they’re going to run a service on their network, if they’re going to operate something, they need that software to be open source for the security reasons alone. They need to be able to audit that. 

And that is something that is becoming more and more of a hard requirement from anyone who runs software: If I’m going to run your software, I need access to the source code. So whether you’re a company that believes open source is great or good, or one that thinks open source is evil and bad, either way you’re still stuck handing things out as open source if you want people to actually run it. So in that sense, there’s this hard fundamental requirement for open source software around the portion that end users are actually running for themselves.

Got it. So you’re just  a few weeks in, but have your early impressions matched your expectations?

More so even than matching, I’ve just been beyond impressed. The people here are great; everyone I’ve met so far has been lovely. And just seeing how Grafana is actually organized and how Grafana encourages a lot of individual initiative—it seems like a company that really pushes down a lot of decision-making in a way other companies don’t. It seems like the higher you go in Grafana, the more your job is to provide context for the engineers and designers and product people so that they can understand what’s valuable, understand the narrative we’re all working towards, and then everyone becomes kind of their own individual storyteller within that broader narrative. 

And that feels unique to me. I haven’t actually worked at a place that’s done it to the degree that Grafana appears to be doing it, and it seems to be working for them. So I’m really excited about that.

And when you think of what you’re hoping to accomplish here, what comes to mind?

I’m going to continue focusing on OpenTelemetry. I’m a co-founder of the project and I’m also on the governance committee, so you could think of me as one of the OpenTelemetry project managers. I try to set the direction for that project, and the way we set direction in OpenTelemetry feels similar to Grafana, where I’m not going to sit there and dictate to the community what they should care about. 

It’s about gathering all the requirements from the community, figuring out what’s most important to everyone, what resources we have available, and what order we should tackle things. And also improving our systems for figuring that out and getting feedback from the community, and making our roadmap a little more visible to end users and people outside the core contributors. 

So that’s the core value I provide to OpenTelemetry, and I’m going to try to provide that internally at Grafana as well—understanding the Grafana roadmap, and understanding where we’re trying to go, and how that lines up with OpenTelemetry being the new ubiquitous standard for data that’s going to power all of these different products that we plan on offering. That’s really where I see the value.

Is there a particular area you really want to focus on?

Even though it’s an awesome open source company, Grafana actually has not traditionally put a lot of resources directly into OpenTelemetry. It’s been a little bit more of a downstream consumer of OpenTelemetry. So alignment is growing, but one thing I really want to help with is to start upstreaming. Get more people directly involved in OpenTelemetry as contributors and kind of knit us together with that community a bit more tightly.

I understand you’re headed to KubeCon EU. What are you most looking forward to there?

I always go as a core maintainer of a CNCF project. KubeCon is kind of our home base, and honestly at this point it’s just seeing friends that I’m most excited about. You have all your buddies, and we’re globally distributed as a community, and KubeCon is one of the few places where I get to see certain people.

I will say, OpenTelemetry has a big booth that we call “the Observatory.” So if someone is going to KubeCon, I would really encourage them to hunt down the Observatory on the showroom floor because it’s a great place to get all of your questions answered. It’s always staffed by core OpenTelemetry maintainers, and we’ll also have a schedule of group discussions and things like that happening. 

And I’ll also be at the Grafana booth, so I’ll be splitting my time between those two places.

And is there anything on the horizon for OpenTelemetry that you’re most excited about?

So many things; too many things! I’m really excited about adding profiling as a signal, which is really important. OpAMP, which is our control plane protocol, has been in beta for a while, but that’s hugely valuable. That’s something that Grafana can really leverage in terms of Fleet Management and Adaptive Telemetry. And I see it enabling Fleet Management’s control plane for the collector, which is just a really valuable feature.

There’s been an explosion of interest in GenAI as AI products are getting out there. We’ve seen a new community of people focused on observing AI systems and making them more efficient. So that’s a fun growing part of OTel. And then there’s client-side telemetry and RUM. OpenTelemetry has been traditionally maybe a little too server-side focused, but we’re re-booting our efforts on the client front. So I’m excited to see that happen.

That is a lot. OK, last question: You already mentioned your background as an animator, but are there any fun facts people should know about you? 

I’m a filmmaker In my spare time, I don’t do animation anymore, but I do live action stuff that’s kind of 80s throwback fantasy. So if you think like Labyrinth, and “The Dark Crystal,” and “The NeverEnding Story,” I really love that stuff. So in my spare time I like to make short films and movies. I have a short film that’s out in festivals right now called “Felix the Fox,” but it’ll hopefully be out on the internet, maybe late summer.

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