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I have reviewed the TOC's moving level readiness triage guide, ensured the criteria for my project are met before opening this issue, and understand that unmet criteria will result in the project's application being closed.
OpenTelemetry Graduation Application
v1.6
This template provides the project with a framework to inform the TOC of their conformance to the Graduation Level Criteria.
This project is currently Incubating, accepted on 2021-08-11, and applying to Graduate.
Adoption Assertion
The project has been adopted by the following organizations in a testing and integration or production capacity:
OpenTelemetry is used at hundreds (potentially thousands) of organizations worldwide. We maintain a best-effort list of adopters on our website, including the following --
Review and acknowledgement of expectations for graduated projects and requirements for moving forward through the CNCF Maturity levels.
Acknowledged during this application (May 2025).
Completion of this due diligence document, resolution of concerns raised, and presentation for public comment satisfies the Due Diligence Review criteria.
Additional documentation as appropriate for project type, e.g.: installation documentation, end-user documentation, reference implementation and/or code samples.
SIGs also maintain language or component specific documentation where appropriate; See this README.md as an example.
We maintain an evolving set of guides for contributors and maintainers as well.
Governance and Maintainers
(May be augmented by TAG Contributor Strategy Governance Review)
Suggested
Governance has continuously been iterated upon by the project as a result of their experience applying it, with the governance history demonstrating evolution of maturity alongside the project's maturity evolution.
Governance Committee charters revised in Sep 2024 to reflect project scale and lessons learned.
As of May 2025, we are revising the Technical Committee charter to improve project resiliency, velocity, and set us up for scaling into the future.
In addition, we've established wide-ranging changes to our project and SIG governance strategies over the years in order to empower maintainers as well as manage scope and complexity.
Governance is up to date with actual project activities, including any meetings, elections, leadership, or approval processes.
– Elections are held annually, most recently in October 2024.
All governance committee meeting notes are published here. Recordings of GC meetings are available upon request.
The community repository contains other relevant documentation.
Document how the project makes decisions on leadership roles, contribution acceptance, requests to the CNCF, and changes to governance or project goals.
– Defined in GC and TC charters; OTEP RFC process governs technical decisions.
Document how role, function-based members, or sub-teams are assigned, onboarded, and removed for specific teams (example: Security Response Committee).
– The membership ladder describes our basic roles and functions.
Each SIG or Project may expand upon these basic guidelines if needed.
Document complete list of current maintainers, including names, contact information, domain of responsibility, and affiliation.
– The maintainer's list on our website draws from GitHub and documents all members and their roles.
A number of active maintainers appropriate to size/scope.
– Given the size and scope of OpenTelemetry, we have a large amount of maintainers.
We currently have over 120 maintainers across all projects and SIGs.
Document a complete maintainer lifecycle process (including roles, onboarding, offboarding, and emeritus status).
– Please see this guide.
Demonstrate usage of the maintainer lifecycle with outcomes, either through the addition or replacement of maintainers as project events have required.
– 2023–24 saw 7 new maintainers added, 4 moved to emeritus.
Document adoption of the CNCF Code of Conduct – Linked in every repo’s README.
CNCF Code of Conduct is cross-linked from other governance documents.
All subprojects are listed. – See “SIGs and Working Groups” table in community repo.
If the project has subprojects: subproject leadership, contribution, maturity status documented, including add/remove process.
– Each SIG README lists maintainers and signal maturity.
This document is the canonical reference for membership.
Contributors and Community
(May be augmented by TAG Contributor Strategy Governance Review)
Suggested
Contributor ladder with multiple roles for contributors
– We have a contributor ladder that defines roles from member to emeritus maintainer.
Project must have, and document, at least one public communications channel for users and/or contributors.
– Our primary public communications channel for announcements and information is our blog on opentelemetry.io.
List and document all project communication channels, including subprojects (mail list/slack/etc.). List any non-public communications channels and what their special purpose is.
– OpenTelemetry, as a large project, supports many communication channels in order to meet our community where they are. The following list is intended to be exhaustive.
CNCF Slack: #opentelemetry, as well as various SIG channels with #otel- prefix. The sigs.yml document contains all of these, and is the source of truth.
Social Media: We maintain an active Mastodon, Bluesky, LinkedIn, and YouTube presence. Links to all of these can be found on our main website, opentelemetry.io
Web and Email: Our canonical source for announcements is opentelemetry.io. We are moving towards a consolidated listserv approach, as our listservs are rarely utilized.
Non-public channels: Project leadership maintains several private channels on CNCF Slack for async discussion about private topics, including security topics.
Up-to-date public meeting schedulers and/or CNCF calendar integration.
– Due to the amount of SIG meetings the project supports, we offer multiple options for calendering.
Our primary calendars are listed on the community repository, but individual SIGs get their own calendar to avoid meeting spam.
Documentation of how to contribute, with increasing detail as the project matures.
– Our contributor guide collects a variety of guidance on project-wide processes.
Individual SIGs may go beyond this and provide SIG-specific guidance in their CONTRIBUTING.md files.
Recently, we launched our Contributor Experience SIG to further study and make recommendations on improving the contribution experience, especially for new contributors.
Demonstrate contributor activity and recruitment.
– OpenTelemetry is one of the largest and most active projects in the CNCF.
We have over 150 unique contributing companies each month, and over 1100 unique contributors a month since the beginning of 2024.
Document project goals and objectives that illustrate the project’s differentiation in the Cloud Native landscape as well as outlines how this project fulfills an outstanding need and/or solves a problem differently. This requirement may also be satisfied by completing a General Technical Review.
– OpenTelemetry seeks to provide a standard, vendor-agnostic, cloud-native, and fully featured telemetry framework.
Document what the project does, and why it does it - including viable cloud native use cases. This requirement may also be satisfied by completing a General Technical Review
– Our documentation lays out a general overview of the purpose and goals of the project, along with details about usage.
Document and maintain a public roadmap or other forward looking planning document or tracking mechanism.
– We maintain several different roadmap documents, and are in the process of consolidating them.
A narrative roadmap document is published by the GC to discuss top-level organization priorities.
Our project board contains in-progress projects and deliverables for the entire organization.
Individual SIGs maintain their own roadmaps and publicize them through our blog and GitHub.
Roadmap change process is documented.
– Our project management process describes how non-trivial specification or scope changes are handled at an organizational level.
Individual SIGs may adopt this, or their own process.
Document overview of project architecture and software design that demonstrates viable cloud native use cases, as part of the project's documentation. This requirement may also be satisfied by completing a General Technical Review and capturing the output in the project's documentation.
– Our documentation contains a variety of examples on how to conceptually integrate OpenTelemetry into cloud-native workloads.
Our specification also includes a thorough architectural overview for each component.
Document the project's release process and guidelines publicly in a RELEASES.md or equivalent file that defines:
Release expectations – Each SIG may choose its own cadence for releases based on the idioms of their language. Conventionally, these are documented in a VERSIONINING.md or other document. All SIGs must follow organization-level guidance on versionining and stability.
Tagging and tag strategies – Please see versioning and stability for a complete discussion. In general, we define broad classes (experimental, stable, deprecated) and allow SIGs to use language-conventional mechanisms to communicate those expectations.
Branch/platform support & support window – Versioning and stability defines the length of support for releases.
Artifacts – Each SIG distributes artifacts through language-conventional mechanisms including package registries, container registries, .deb and .rpm files, etc. We rely on GitHub as the source of truth for all binary artifacts.
History of regular, quality releases.
– Each SIG releases on a self-directed cadence based on project needs. Some SIGs release biweekly, some monthly, others as-needed. Our upgrade policy defines our goals around backwards compatibility and upgrade process for consumers of telemetry and other artifacts.
Security
(May be augmented by TAG Security assessment)
Suggested
Achieving OpenSSF Best Practices silver or gold badge. – In progress.
Required
Clearly defined and discoverable process to report security issues.
– GitHub “Security” tab.
Enforcing Access Control Rules to secure the code base against attacks (Example: two factor authentication enforcement, and/or use of ACL tools.)
– 2FA required for org members; branch protections enabled.
Publicly documented list of adopters, which may indicate their adoption level (dev/trialing, prod, etc.)
– Our website has a list of adopters.
We also have a variety of self-identified adopters that are not captured in this list, for some more examples please see our most recent KubeCon Project Update
Used in appropriate capacity by at least 3 independent + indirect/direct adopters, (these are not required to be in the publicly documented list of adopters)
– The project has provided a variety of public and non-public adopters to the TOC; You can also refer to the adopter list linked earlier as well as at the preface to this issue.
TOC verification of adopters.
– Pending TOC.
Clearly documented integrations and/or compatibility with other CNCF and non-CNCF projects.
Review Project Moving Level Evaluation
OpenTelemetry Graduation Application
v1.6
This template provides the project with a framework to inform the TOC of their conformance to the Graduation Level Criteria.
Project Repo(s): https://github.com/open-telemetry
Project Site: https://opentelemetry.io
Sub-Projects: OpenTelemetry Specification, Collector, Client SDKs (.NET, Go, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Ruby, PHP, C++, Rust, Erlang/Elixir), Operator, Demo, Contrib repos
Communication: CNCF Slack (
#opentelemetry, language/SIG-specific channels)Graduation point of contact: Austin Parker (mailto:austin@honeycomb.io)
Project points of contacts: Governance Committee (mailto:admin@opentelemetry.io)
Graduation Criteria Summary for OpenTelemetry
Application Level Assertion
Adoption Assertion
The project has been adopted by the following organizations in a testing and integration or production capacity:
OpenTelemetry is used at hundreds (potentially thousands) of organizations worldwide. We maintain a best-effort list of adopters on our website, including the following --
In addition, OpenTelemetry is supported by all major observability vendors as of this writing. In no particular order --
Application Process Principles
Suggested
N/A
Required
Engage with the domain specific TAG(s) to increase awareness through a presentation or completing a General Technical Review.
TAG provides insight/recommendation of the project in the context of the landscape
All project metadata and resources are vendor-neutral.
Review and acknowledgement of expectations for graduated projects and requirements for moving forward through the CNCF Maturity levels.
Completion of this due diligence document, resolution of concerns raised, and presentation for public comment satisfies the Due Diligence Review criteria.
Governance and Maintainers
(May be augmented by TAG Contributor Strategy Governance Review)
Suggested
Required
– Elections are held annually, most recently in October 2024.
– A maximum of two members from a single organization can participate on the Governance Committee or Technical Committee.
– Defined in GC and TC charters; OTEP RFC process governs technical decisions.
– The membership ladder describes our basic roles and functions.
– The maintainer's list on our website draws from GitHub and documents all members and their roles.
– Given the size and scope of OpenTelemetry, we have a large amount of maintainers.
– Please see this guide.
– 2023–24 saw 7 new maintainers added, 4 moved to emeritus.
– Maintainers span >15 companies.
– CODEOWNERS files auto-synced with GitHub teams.
README.– Each SIG README lists maintainers and signal maturity.
Contributors and Community
(May be augmented by TAG Contributor Strategy Governance Review)
Suggested
– We have a contributor ladder that defines roles from member to emeritus maintainer.
Required
– CONTRIBUTING guides; GitHub PR flow.
– Our primary public communications channel for announcements and information is our blog on opentelemetry.io.
– OpenTelemetry, as a large project, supports many communication channels in order to meet our community where they are. The following list is intended to be exhaustive.
– Due to the amount of SIG meetings the project supports, we offer multiple options for calendering.
– Our contributor guide collects a variety of guidance on project-wide processes.
– OpenTelemetry is one of the largest and most active projects in the CNCF.
Engineering Principles
– OpenTelemetry seeks to provide a standard, vendor-agnostic, cloud-native, and fully featured telemetry framework.
– Our documentation lays out a general overview of the purpose and goals of the project, along with details about usage.
– We maintain several different roadmap documents, and are in the process of consolidating them.
– Our project management process describes how non-trivial specification or scope changes are handled at an organizational level.
– Our documentation contains a variety of examples on how to conceptually integrate OpenTelemetry into cloud-native workloads.
– Each SIG releases on a self-directed cadence based on project needs. Some SIGs release biweekly, some monthly, others as-needed. Our upgrade policy defines our goals around backwards compatibility and upgrade process for consumers of telemetry and other artifacts.
Security
(May be augmented by TAG Security assessment)
Suggested
Required
– GitHub “Security” tab.
– 2FA required for org members; branch protections enabled.
– Our Security SIG documents our response roles, charter, and processes.
– See https://github.com/cncf/tag-security/blob/main/community/assessments/projects/open-telemetry/self-assessment.md
– Audit by OSTIF/7ASecurity, Jan 2024; all high/medium issues fixed.
– Collector and core SDKs have Passing badge.
Ecosystem
Suggested
N/A
Required
– Our website has a list of adopters.
– The project has provided a variety of public and non-public adopters to the TOC; You can also refer to the adopter list linked earlier as well as at the preface to this issue.
– Pending TOC.
Adoption
These are three examples of the many organizations and verticals that have adopted OpenTelemetry.
Adopter 1 – Amazon Web Services / Cloud Provider
Production since 2021 via the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry.
Adopter 2 – Shopify / E-commerce
Production since 2020; KubeCon EU 2020 talk “Observability at Shopify with OpenTelemetry”.
Adopter 3 – ecobee / Consumer IoT
Production since 2021; case study on Honeycomb blog.
Additional adopters available upon request.