Take a closer look at the role of open source and open standards in observability today, based on the results from the 2026 Observability Survey, the largest community-driven survey on the state of the industry.

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The 2026 Grafana Labs Observability Survey (1,300+ respondents) reveals that open source and open standards are now central to observability strategies, with 77% of respondents rating them as important. Prometheus leads in production adoption (59% in production vs. 41% for OpenTelemetry), but OpenTelemetry is growing faster with 47% of respondents increasing usage year-over-year. OpenTelemetry is being adopted across all three major telemetry signals—metrics (57%), traces (50%), and logs (48%)—with teams primarily valuing it for ease of adoption and vendor flexibility. The data signals a broader industry shift away from single-vendor lock-in toward portable, open standards.

Open standards in 2026: The backbone of modern observability