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 - intro01:39 - OTel Unplugged background06:60 - stabilization and graduation21:49 - OTel blueprints26:24 - OTel collectors tied to vendors 30:14 - bad telemetry32:40 - OpenTelemetry-Prometheus compatibility39:49 - OpenTelemetry Injector43:07 - OpenTelemetry Weaver45:33 - Instrumentation Score51:15 - mobile and browser observability52:23 - YAML configuration for SDK55:19 - additional events for OTel community58:00 - Jaeger v2.15.0 release1:00:18 - outro Resources:OTel Unplugged: https://opentelemetry.io/blog/2025/otel-unplugged-fosdem/ OTel OBI for eBPF instrumentation: https://medium.com/p/377cb0432bf1Mobile 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 Socials:BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/openobservability.bsky.socialX (Twitter): ⁠https://twitter.com/OpenObserv⁠LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/openobservability/YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠Dotan Horovits============Twitter: @horovitsLinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/horovitsMastodon: @horovits@fosstodonBlueSky: @horovits.bsky.socialJuraci Paixão Kröhling==================LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jpkroehling/OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.