Opentelemetry Adoption Update: Rust, Prometheus And Other Speed Bumps

OpenTelemetry is arguably surviving up to its hype. The unfastened root task for observability has evolved complete nan past fewer years to go nan de facto modular of prime for a quickly increasing number of organizations successful request of instrumenting applications and standardizing telemetry data. It is designed truthful that nan information tin beryllium understood by different observability platforms and visualization and retention systems of your choice.

The project’s contributors to this starring CNCF task down Kubernetes stay progressive successful improving OpenTelemetry’s easiness of usage and implementation and adding caller features. However, OpenTelemetry remains a activity successful progress, and it is still not yet universally adopted for each organizations’ needs.

@opentelemetry support for @rustlang remains successful beta shape for traces, metrics and logs, arsenic @grafana‘s Tom Donohue, showed astatine nan OpenTelemetry Workshop astatine ObservabilityCon successful London this week. pic.twitter.com/etrU0BuipC

— BC Gain (@bcamerongain), October 9, 2025

Target areas for betterment proceed to beryllium OpenTelemetry support for each programming languages for metrics, logs and traces. Rust remains nan connection that is little supported by OpenTelemetry, according to nan OpenTelemetry project’s documentation. Traces, metrics and logs stay nether improvement for Rust applications. All different awesome programming languages listed successful OpenTelemetry’s archiving support astatine slightest metrics. This is mostly owed to respective factors, including its comparatively caller take astatine standard compared to nan different commonly utilized languages and really metrics person worked good alternatively of OpenTelemetry for instrumentation.

Complexity

Meanwhile, OpenTelemetry is often seen arsenic analyzable to instrumentality and manage, representing a important wide take hurdle. Indeed, nan implementation of OpenTelemetry tin beryllium challenging and complex, specified arsenic successful very ample and at-scale multicluster and unreality environments. (Although erstwhile nan implementation activity is completed, OpenTelemetry arsenic a azygous instrumentation successful usage tin spell a agelong measurement successful reducing complexity.)

“OpenTelemetry is analyzable and difficult to install,” Ted Young, developer programs head for Grafana Labs, told maine during ObservabilityCon successful London. That said, nan halfway committedness of standardizing observability signals — traces, metrics and logs — surely meets real-world challenges, peculiarly successful nan domain of metrics and bequest systems, Young said. But while nan task is seen arsenic basal “to past nan future,” respective cardinal areas are driving friction, Young said.

For tracing, ensuring due semantic conventions for labels and attributes poses challenges for developers erstwhile drafting ingress information done OpenTelemetry. Large organizations pinch hundreds of developers must guarantee semantic conventions stay uniform. This developer-centric attack to instrumentation leads to “the weakest information quality” successful tracing, arsenic it is inherently “harder to get it right,” Young said.

The deficiency of established and broad communal conventions exacerbates this issue. While activity exists for modular protocols for illustration HTTP labeling, galore “nonstandard protocols” — specified arsenic “messaging” aliases older “remote process telephone stuff” — deficiency nan basal conventions, Young said. These communal conventions are basal to let an observability backend to “automatically understand what it’s seen,” enabling precocious features for illustration “knowledge graph” correlations.

Prometheus Unbound

Organizations that already trust connected Prometheus for their telemetry signals often spot a request to adhd OpenTelemetry for their metrics. Doing truthful is often considered a consequence of breaking thing that is not surgery while perchance adding much complexity to their situation by implementing Prometheus for metrics. Compatibility issues betwixt OpenTelemetry and Prometheus stay an issue.

Prometheus now integrates good pinch OpenTelemetry and remains a halfway portion of nan ecosystem. This title was only surface-level. That said, Prometheus 2.0 introduced challenges erstwhile utilized arsenic a metrics backend done OpenTelemetry, complicating take early on.

There person been compatibility problems that trace backmost good earlier nan merchandise of Prometheus 3.0. On a very basal level, location has been a quality successful creation philosophy. Compatibility problems related to information formats wrong Prometheus, specifically pinch histograms and nan information forwarding protocol, stay an rumor pinch OpenTelemetry.

With nan merchandise of Prometheus 3.0, location are already a number of improvements that make collecting metrics done OpenTelemetry importantly amended and little achy than successful nan past. Issues remain, arsenic described above, but activity is ongoing, and pinch nan support of nan unfastened root community, I tin corroborate firsthand that location is simply a batch of momentum to flooded these issues, which will beryllium addressed successful upcoming Prometheus releases.

This is 1 area wherever Prometheus plays a role. Current efforts impact actively “refactoring these labels” to beryllium much compliant pinch conventions defined by Prometheus and Mimir to amended nan building and collatability of data.

Rust Does Sleep

Rust is simply a newer programming language, and moving pinch it is difficult compared to celebrated languages specified arsenic JavaScript aliases moreover Python. But OpenTelemetry’s lateness successful its compatibility pinch Rust is owed mostly to really tracing pinch unfastened root Tokio useful good already.

It is simply a bully point that Rust already has a wide adopted system, Young said. However, it besides creates an “awkward situation” wherever nan OTel organization is debating whether to “just adopt Tokio tracing arsenic nan official” solution for nan Rust organization to summation precocious adoption, Young said. All this contempt its limitations and nan deficiency of momentum from its original developers.

The OpenTelemetry organization faces unsocial integration problems pinch nan Rust ecosystem, stemming from nan language’s wide adopted autochthonal tooling. “The bully point successful Rust is it has a point called Tokio tracing,” Young said. “But nan point astir Tokio tracing is it’s not distributed tracing. It’s much like, almost like, stack tracing … The problem is they activity a spot differently. Tokio tracing doesn’t do distributed tracing.”

This method spread — betwixt OTel’s request for distributed tracing and Tokio’s attraction connected stack tracing — is compounded by issues of attraction and momentum. “Tokio — arsenic successful nan institution Tokio — they’re not an observability company, and Tokio tracing is starting to look beautiful unmaintained,” Young said. “It’s conscionable an awkward business wherever we’re like, possibly we’ll conscionable adopt Tokio tracing arsenic nan official.”

The business for early integration remains slow and uncertain. “There’s cipher location connected that side, right? Because it seems for illustration there’s not a batch of momentum,” Young said. “Now successful Tokio tracing, I spot like, whoa, what do we do? But that organization is moving it out. It’s conscionable slow to fig retired what really is nan correct point to offer.”

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