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Mat Duggan0 Hot0 comments15 min read
OTel Isn't Going Well (And I Made A Spreadsheet About It)
A data-driven investigation into why OpenTelemetry's development feels perpetually stuck in 'experimental' limbo. Using GitHub activity metrics across 24 months, the analysis compares OTel language SDKs (Go, Python, PHP, Ruby, C++, Kotlin, JS, .NET) against healthier CNCF projects like Envoy and Prometheus. The finding: most OTel repos are dangerously concentrated around one or two maintainers (PHP at 53% top-merger share, C++ at 86%, Kotlin at 80%), unlike Envoy and Prometheus's broad maintainer benches. The root cause isn't primarily vendor politics slowing down semantic-conventions discussions (those stay siloed), but a collision between strict stability guarantees, a thin maintainer pool, and an enormous scope of languages and frameworks. Proposed fixes include a time-bound beta tier between experimental and stable, and being honest that languages like Go and Ruby are not maintained at parity, so users can set expectations accordingly.
Source: https://matduggan.com/otel-isnt-going-well-and-i-made-a-spreadsheet-about-it. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.
