Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

It's 2026. Your New Year's resolution was to finally migrate to OpenTelemetry. But you're staring at dozens of dashboards that depend on your current data format, and that migration deadline is looming... Sound familiar? If you're an SRE or Platform Engineer facing a top-down OTel mandate, you're not alone. The challenge isn't just about adopting a new standard—it's about doing so without disrupting the observability systems your team depends on every day.

As application systems grow more complex, it becomes ever more important to understand how services interact across distributed systems. Observability sheds light on the behavior of instrumented applications and the infrastructure they run on. This enables engineering teams to gain better track system health and prevent critical failures. OpenTelemetry (OTel) has standardized how we generate and transmit telemetry, and the OpenTelemetry Collector is the engine that processes and export this data.

Distributed tracing is a core tool for operating modern microservices platforms. For SREs and DevOps teams, it is often the fastest way to understand latency issues, service dependencies, and unexpected failure modes. But achieving comprehensive tracing coverage is resource-intensive and time-consuming. It usually requires application changes, language-specific instrumentation, agent lifecycle management, and ongoing coordination with development teams.

The CNCF reported that between 39% and 56% of organizations surveyed are now ingesting traces as part of their observability strategy. Tracing has become a cornerstone of any modern observability operation. Customers are regularly handling 10s of billions of spans every day, but with billions of spans, how can teams quickly figure out what is changing, what’s breaking, or what’s slowing down?

OpenTelemetry is deprecating the Zipkin exporter specification. Zipkin now supports OTLP ingestion natively, so the custom exporter logic in OTel SDKs is no longer necessary.

When I was building applications, I used to always rely on the DevTools console of my web browser to examine logs in the frontend. But, with UI log messages only being accessible within your browser rather than forwarded to a file somewhere, which is the common pattern with backend services, losing visibility of this resource when triaging user issues was a real dilemma.

Tracing is the richest observability signal in common use today. In distributed systems, it reveals how requests flow across multiple services, allowing you to uncover and address performance bottlenecks. Teams often scale back or abandon tracing altogether, however, because most successful requests produce redundant data that’s noisy and expensive to store.