In 2024, the End User SIG conducted a Collector Survey to gather feedback on how the OpenTelemetry Collector is used in practice and the user experience. Insights from that survey informed several development and prioritization decisions within the community.
As a follow-up, we conducted another survey in 2025 to understand how deployment practices, usage patterns, and implementation challenges have evolved since then. This blog post presents an analysis of the results, highlighting notable changes compared to the previous year.

OpenTelemetry's platform is an observability framework, offering insights into distributed tracing, metrics collection, and log management for cloud-native applications. Through documentation, tutorials, and community contributions, OpenTelemetry provides insights into instrumenting applications to monitor performance and troubleshoot issues. Developers and DevOps teams can learn about distributed tracing standards, telemetry data formats, and integration with observability tools to gain visibility into complex distributed systems.

OpenTelemetry

The 2025 OpenTelemetry Collector survey reveals significant growth in deployment scale, with 65% of users running more than 10 collectors. VM usage jumped from 33% to 51%, while Kubernetes remains dominant at 81%. Custom collector builds increased by 13%, though 61% of users find the Collector Builder difficult to use. Key pain points include configuration management, stability concerns, and collector observability. Component usage shifted notably, with increases in otlphttpexporter, datadogexporter, filelogreceiver, and transformprocessor. Users consistently request better documentation, dynamic reconfiguration capabilities, improved performance at scale, and stronger backward compatibility guarantees.

OpenTelemetry Collector Follow-up Survey