OpenTelemetry and Prometheus Interoperability Improves, Survey Reveals Shifting Observability Strategies

A recent survey conducted by OpenTelemetry contributors reveals a notable improvement in the interoperability between OpenTelemetry and Prometheus for metrics collection, processing, and storage. The survey, which gathered data from active OpenTelemetry users with Prometheus-adjacent backends, indicates that the average ease-of-use rating for combining the two technologies has risen from 3.1 to 3.6 since a similar 2024 survey. Crucially, the percentage of respondents finding it difficult to use both together has dropped from 29% to 10%. This development is significant for practitioners as it validates the ongoing efforts within the observability community to foster better integration and reduce vendor lock-in. For DevOps teams, this means less friction when adopting OpenTelemetry alongside existing Prometheus deployments, allowing for a more gradual and strategic transition or a sustained hybrid model. The survey also highlights that while Prometheus exporters are still the most common method for infrastructure instrumentation (72%), OpenTelemetry receivers are close behind (57%), with nearly half of respondents running both concurrently. For application instrumentation, OpenTelemetry SDKs are now the most-used method at 65%, surpassing Prometheus SDKs at 52%. This trend aligns with the broader movement in cloud-native observability towards open standards and vendor-neutral telemetry. OpenTelemetry's graduation as a CNCF project earlier this year further solidified its position as a foundational element of modern observability stacks. The project's focus on providing a unified set of APIs, SDKs, and tools for generating and collecting telemetry data (traces, metrics, and logs) naturally complements Prometheus, which has long been a de facto standard for metrics monitoring in Kubernetes environments. The improved interoperability reflects the community's commitment to enabling flexible and comprehensive observability solutions without requiring wholesale rip-and-replace strategies. In practice, these findings suggest that organizations can confidently pursue a phased adoption of OpenTelemetry, integrating it with their existing Prometheus setups. Practitioners should consider leveraging OpenTelemetry SDKs for new application development to gain richer, correlated telemetry, while continuing to utilize Prometheus exporters for established infrastructure monitoring. The prevalence of both Prometheus relabeling rules (54%) and the OpenTelemetry Collector (53%) for processing steps indicates that teams are actively using both tools in their data pipelines. This hybrid approach allows for incremental improvements in observability coverage and depth, ultimately leading to better insights into complex distributed systems. Teams should continue to monitor OpenTelemetry's evolving capabilities, especially around its Collector and semantic conventions, to optimize their observability strategies.