The State of OpenTelemetry: Insights from OTel Unplugged Europe - OpenObservability Talks S6E08

February 2026 the OpenTelemetry community gathered at OTel Unplugged event in Brussels. It was the first time this unconference was held in Europe, bringing together maintainers, contributors, governance committee members, and end usersIn this episode our host Dotan Horovits and guest Juraci Paixão Kröhling will discuss their insights from the event about the current state of the project, roadmap, challenges, community and more.

Juraci is a software engineer, a Governance Committee member for the OpenTelemetry project, and an emeritus maintainer of the Jaeger project, and the co-founder of OllyGarden, an OpenTelemetry-based startup.

You can read the recap post: https://medium.com/p/e00f219f7460/

Show Notes:

00:00 - intro

01:39 - OTel Unplugged background

06:60 - stabilization and graduation

21:49 - OTel blueprints

26:24 - OTel collectors tied to vendors 

30:14 - bad telemetry

32:40 - OpenTelemetry-Prometheus compatibility

39:49 - OpenTelemetry Injector

43:07 - OpenTelemetry Weaver

45:33 - Instrumentation Score

51:15 - mobile and browser observability

52:23 - YAML configuration for SDK

55:19 - additional events for OTel community

58:00 - Jaeger v2.15.0 release

1:00:18 - outro 

Resources:

• OTel Unplugged: https://opentelemetry.io/blog/2025/otel-unplugged-fosdem/ 

• OTel OBI for eBPF instrumentation: https://medium.com/p/377cb0432bf1

• Mobile observability with OTel: https://medium.com/p/2eb847c41941 

• OTel Injector: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-injector 

• OTel Weaver and Observability by Design approach: https://opentelemetry.io/blog/2025/otel-weaver/ 

• OTel blueprints proposal: https://github.com/open-telemetry/community/pull/3094 

• Instrumentation Score: https://github.com/instrumentation-score/spec 

• Jaeger v2.15.0 release: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger/releases/tag/v2.15.0 

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Dotan Horovits

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Twitter: @horovits

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/horovits

Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon

BlueSky: @horovits.bsky.social

Juraci Paixão Kröhling

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jpkroehling/

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