Recent findings from Splunk’s annual “State of Observability 2025 Report” are clear: OpenTelemetry has evolved from an industry standard to a business strategy. The project has grown beyond the standard for collecting and disseminating observability data and is empowering users with the flexibility and granularity to control their data in ways that positively influence revenue, operating margins and brand perception. The project is also helping strengthen the AI adoption process.

When organizations standardize with OpenTelemetry, they’re collecting richer data and laying the groundwork for better generative AI (GenAI) outcomes.

However, despite its rapid growth and ability to drive positive business outcomes, OpenTelemetry can have a daunting implementation process for some. While early adopters of the project by necessity fully embraced cloud native and distributed architectures, the reality for many organizations is that the implementation effort for OpenTelemetry has sometimes been a barrier, due to difficulty instrumenting legacy systems. It is clear there’s still much the community can do to make OpenTelemetry easier to implement and more intuitive, so all organizations can achieve its benefits.

Splunk, along with Google, Microsoft and LightStep (now ServiceNow), are among the most notable contributors to OpenTelemetry, and today that legacy continues with the latest donation to the project from Splunk: the OpenTelemetry Injector.

Simply put, the OpenTelemetry Injector donation makes implementation incredibly easy and expands OpenTelemetry’s reach and ease of use for organizations with diverse infrastructure. It enables zero-code instrumentation for applications written in popular languages running on Linux hosts and significantly reduces the operational burden of implementation.

With the OpenTelemetry Injector, organizations can capture metrics, traces, logs and profiles from their infrastructure and applications with a single simple step and no required changes to application code or startup scripts. By making instrumentation easier and less intrusive, the injector encourages wider adoption of OpenTelemetry for organizations with existing applications where code changes might be difficult or impractical.

OpenTelemetry is the de facto standard for collecting machine data across the industry. Its massive set of integrations, consistent data model and semantic conventions, broad set of signals, ability to export data anywhere, impressive data customization options, and massive community have made it the clear choice for organizations around the world. With the injector, an organization can gain all the benefits of OpenTelemetry more easily.

In addition, it offers a way to help accelerate the adoption of the project so more organizations can gain its benefits through features that enhance Kubernetes capabilities and make them available upstream. The impact of this is:

• Improved logging scales that help reduce noise.
• Advanced metrics collection for data-driven decision-making.
• Sophisticated pipeline features for data manipulation and routing that make data more relevant to the organization.
• Support for Kubernetes annotations and multiline logs for effective and efficient observability in containerized environments.
• Zero-code instrumentation to allow for additional observability applications without changing source code.
• Sensitive value redaction for additional security and privacy.

One of the most recent, important advancements that allows for the accelerated adoption of OpenTelemetry is Automatic Discovery.

Automatic Discovery, which will be available in the project in 2026, is a zero-code instrumentation feature that detects and collects signal data from third-party services, such as databases and web servers. Through Automatic Discovery, the Collector automatically generates a configuration snippet that you can modify and incorporate into your existing configuration to retrieve your services’ data — simplifying deployment, enabling advanced observability capabilities and reducing operational overhead.

OpenTelemetry powers deeper business insights, like providing organizations access to rich telemetry data that helps provide data context to address business problems that may otherwise fly under the radar, like a disruption to customers’ online experience. And now with the new Injector simplifying the setup process, organizations can realize the business advantages of OpenTelemetry sooner.

To learn more about OpenTelemetry and the Injector, stop by the OpenTelemetry Observatory at Kubecon North America. Or you can also drop by the onsite Splunk booth (#1410). You can find more information about OpenTelemetry and how to get involved with the project at opentelemetry.io. For more information about Splunk Observability, visit us at splunk.com.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 is taking place Nov. 10-13 in Atlanta, Georgia. Register now.

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