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

OpenTelemetry, a rapidly growing open-source project in the cloud-native ecosystem, experienced significant developments in 2024, including a 45% increase in code commits and a doubling in Google search volume, signaling its rising prominence. Major milestones included the stabilization of the profiling signal, which allows users to correlate resource telemetry data with code components, and the Spring Boot starter, simplifying the instrumentation of Spring Boot applications. Updates to Semantic Conventions and the release of new open-source code for the OpenTelemetry Datadog receiver further enhanced its capabilities. Grafana Labs, a leading contributor to both OpenTelemetry and Prometheus, integrated support for the project into its products, such as Grafana Beyla and Grafana Alloy, while also advancing application observability solutions. Looking ahead to 2025, the OpenTelemetry community aims to expand eBPF instrumentation, enhance language-level support, and stabilize the OpenTelemetry Collector, with Grafana Labs continuing to foster collaboration and innovation within the community.