KubeCon Europe 2025: OpenTelemetry Recap from London

OpenTelemetry is officially the second-largest project in the CNCF, only behind Kubernetes. This year we had 13.000 engineers, maintainers, and vendors show up in London.

OpenTelemetry: Stability, Growth, and GA Milestones

The OpenTelemetry project has fulfilled the graduation prerequisites. A major milestone for the community.

The OpenTelemetry governance committee shared some notable updates:

• JavaScript SDK 2.0 was released
• Go Auto-Instrumentation using eBPF launched in Beta
• Observing Lambdas using the OpenTelemetry Collector Extension Layer
• OpenTelemetry Demo 2.0 was released
• Kubernetes annotation-based discovery for the OpenTelemetry Collector

However, major milestones were hit with:

• Profiling Support: Profiling has officially been added as a new signal type in OTLP with version 1.30.0. The opentelemetry-ebpf-profiler repository has seen steady improvements, enabling high-performance, low-overhead CPU profiling. The OpenTelemetry Collector now supports profiling across 12 components via feature flags, and work is underway to define semantic conventions tailored to profiling data.
• Semantic Conventions Expansion: Further stabilization for key areas like database client attributes, code.* fields, and system-level metrics. These improvements will drive consistency and better correlation across signals.
• OpenTelemetry Weaver: Introduces a new way to integrate semantic conventions directly into the dev workflow. Developers can define telemetry schemas, generate type-safe SDKs, validate telemetry in tests, handle schema changes automatically, and protect dashboards and alerts from breaking changes.
• OpenTelemetry Collector Growth: Over the past 12 months, the OpenTelemetry Collector has added 43 new components and advanced 16 core modules to 1.x maturity. This signals growing confidence in production-readiness and extensibility.

What’s Coming Next for OpenTelemetry

The road ahead for OpenTelemetry is just as exciting. In the OpenTelemetry project update session the governance committee outlined a few key areas of focus:

• Upcoming Semantic Conventions: Work is underway to define semantic conventions tailored to profiling data, feature flags, Kubernetes metrics, messaging and RPC.
• Structured Logging API: In progress within the specification is a new structured logging API for events. Once finalized, it will enable robust client-side telemetry, including Real User Monitoring (RUM) events, browser performance metrics, structured logs for GenAI observability, and beyond.
• OpenTelemetry Collector: Add batching to exporters and internal telemetry revamp. Work on getting the OTLP receiver to 1.x maturity.

Community Momentum and Maintainer Energy

One of the best parts of KubeCon is the sense of community. The OpenTelemetry project hosted an OpenTelemetry Observatory booth sponsored by our friends at Splunk. Spending time there during KubeCon and interacting with the community was my personal highlight of this year’s conference.

The OpenTelemetry Community also hosted a ContribFest, where attendees could help contribute to the project and be guided by maintainers. This year also had a dedicated maintainer day and dinner to nurture collaboration.

During the Observability Maintainers Track, maintainers emphasized the growing contributions from global teams and the importance of vendor-neutral standards.

Talks ranged across topics covering:

• Telemetry pipelines
• OpAMP
• WASM-based instrumentation
• Auto-instrumentation

What I think stole the show regarding interest was the opportunity of getting fleet management for OTel Collectors with OpAMP. Andy from our team did a talk with Evan Bradley from Dynatrace explaining it in detail.

Bindplane just announced early access for “Bring Your Own Collector” and released an open-source OpenTelemetry Distribution Builder.

Final Thoughts: A Community on the Move

This year’s KubeCon Europe was the biggest yet. It’s a clear signal (pun intended) that OpenTelemetry is the lingua franca of observability. It has reached graduation prerequisites, is nurturing a community, and growing vendor adoption.

If you’re building or operating distributed systems, now’s the time to get serious about standardizing your telemetry. Whether you're just starting with traces or looking to unify your observability pipelines, OpenTelemetry offers the tooling—and the community—to help you succeed.

Until next time, cheers from the Bindplane team! 🍻