Monday | November 9, 2026

OpenTelemetry Graduation Milestone Accomplished! What’s Next?

11:50 AM-12:15 PM
Salt Palace | Level 2 | 250 D-F

• Morgan McLean, Director of Product Management - Splunk by Cisco
• Alolita Sharma, OpenTelemetry GC Member & Maintainer, Observability Engineering Leader - Apple
• Austin Parker, Director of AI Strategy - honeycomb.io
• Liudmila Molkova, Staff Software Engineer - Google

OpenTelemetry (OTel) has officially graduated, solidifying its place as the industry standard for observability. But graduation isn’t the finish line—it’s just the launchpad.

Join OTel maintainers and governance committee members for a forward-looking panel on what’s next for the ecosystem. We’ll cover the roadmap shaping the future of observability, including the latest on continuous profiling and how OTel is evolving to meet the massive demands of GenAI infrastructure.

Bring your questions and get a first look at the initiatives that will define the next decade of cloud-native observability.

Simplifying OpenTelemetry: How the Packaging SIG Makes Installation (Much) Easier Than Nagios

3:55 PM-4:20 PM
Salt Palace | Level 2 | 250 A-C

• Antoine Tolume, Principal Product Manager - Splunk by Cisco

What do Nagios and CollectD have that OpenTelemetry lacks?

An installation method as simple as `apt install opentelemetry`!

Today, a typical user needs to install and configure instrumentation SDKs (per app and/or globally per machine), optionally set up the OpenTelemetry injector and collector. Add a layer of fleet management with OpAmp to fine tune config. If you factor in vulnerability patching and regular updates, maintaining this type of solution is a full time job.

The newly minted OpenTelemetry Packaging SIG will take you through how they endeavored in making OpenTelemetry easy to install and configure. We will show you how the OpenTelemetry many packages piece together to form as a cohesive product. We will demonstrate how you will be able to install OpenTelemetry fleet-wide in a few minutes.

You will leave this talk with the knowledge necessary to standardize your OpenTelemetry deployments on Linux, and the tips to use overlay configurations to fine tune them.

From YAML Blues to Autocomplete: Schema-First Config for OpenTelemetry Collector Components

5:00 PM-5:25 PM
Salt Palace | Level 2 | 250 D-F

• Jan Korona, Staff Software Engineer - Splunk by Cisco

What do Nagios and CollectD have that OpenTelemetry lacks?

An installation method as simple as `apt install opentelemetry`!

Today, a typical user needs to install and configure instrumentation SDKs (per app and/or globally per machine), optionally set up the OpenTelemetry injector and collector. Add a layer of fleet management with OpAmp to fine tune config. If you factor in vulnerability patching and regular updates, maintaining this type of solution is a full time job.

The newly minted OpenTelemetry Packaging SIG will take you through how they endeavored in making OpenTelemetry easy to install and configure. We will show you how the OpenTelemetry many packages piece together to form as a cohesive product. We will demonstrate how you will be able to install OpenTelemetry fleet-wide in a few minutes.

You will leave this talk with the knowledge necessary to standardize your OpenTelemetry deployments on Linux, and the tips to use overlay configurations to fine tune them.

Tuesday | November 10, 2026

OpenTelemetry Contribfest

11:30 AM-12:50 PM
Salt Palace | Level 2 | 255 D

• Tyler Yahn, Senior Staff Software Engineer - Splunk 
• Dimitry Anoshin, Senior Staff Software Engineer - Splunk 
• + Others! 

Fresh off the heels of graduating as a CNCF project, OpenTelemetry returns with its popular Contribfest session! This is a fantastic opportunity for new contributors to get involved with one of the most impactful open-source observability projects. You’ll be guided and supported onsite by maintainers from across the project, including the Collector, semantic conventions, language localization, entities, OpAMP, and more.

It’s never too late to join the thousands of OpenTelemetry contributors worldwide, and this session is designed to help you submit your first (or 10th!) contribution to the project.

Whether you’re a developer, SRE, or just curious about OpenTelemetry, this session will empower you with the skills and confidence to contribute to open source. No prior experience with OpenTelemetry is required; just bring your laptop and enthusiasm!

Wednesday | November 11, 2026

OTel Blueprints: Prescriptive Patterns for Enterprise Observability

11:00 - 11:30 AM 
Hyatt Regency | Level 4 | Regency Ballroom B-D

• Lukasz Ciukaj, Observability Solutions Architect - Splunk by Cisco
• Dan Gomez Blanco, Principal Observability Architect - New Relic 

As OpenTelemetry adoption scales and the project extends its breadth, end users find themselves navigating a large configuration surface: SDKs, Collector deployments, data pipelines, instrumentation libraries, semantic conventions... They can all create accidental complexity when not considered as part of a cohesive strategy, resulting in disjointed telemetry and a lack of context, the opposite of OTel's vision.

In this session, we'll introduce OTel Blueprints, a community-driven initiative providing prescriptive guidance for deploying OTel across its many components, grounded in real-world reference implementations. We will walk through newly published blueprints tailored for common enterprise architectures, exploring actionable design patterns for Kubernetes observability, non-Kubernetes infrastructure, and building centralized telemetry platforms that can scale.

Attendees will learn how to apply these blueprints to build a scalable, consolidated observability strategy.

OpenTelemetry in Your Pocket

4:10 - 4:40 PM
Hyatt Regency | Level 4 | Regency Ballroom B-D

• Jason Plumb, Engineer - Splunk by Cisco

The OpenTelemetry Android Agent reached a stable 1.0.0 milestone in January! Our API provides Android developers with an OpenTelemetry-first, Kotlin-based domain-specific language (DSL) that makes it easy to instrument your mobile application.

In this session, we will discuss the features offered by OpenTelemetry Android and some of the techniques used to operate reliably in a highly diverse and hostile runtime environment. We will show you the ins and outs of the DSL and how simple it is to use in your application today. You'll also learn how to apply auto-instrumentation at build-time in order to trace calls to your edge services.

All of this will be accompanied by a live demo running on a physical phone.