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OpenTelemetry and Prometheus are getting along. What’s still missing?
Welcome to another edition of Road to KubeCon, where we’re tracking the major movements in the Kubernetes and cloud native ecosystem on the path to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2026, happening Nov. 9–12 in Salt Lake City, Utah.
This week, we look at how cloud-native teams are putting observability to work. There’s progress on OpenTelemetry and Prometheus interoperability, a migration spanning 100,000 hosts, and new data on the costs and benefits of monitoring AI systems. Plus, HPE’s latest Gartner recognition, agent governance updates, and a father-and-son story from KubeCon India.
HPE GreenLake named a Leader in Gartner quadrant
On Wednesday, HPE announced it had been named a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Infrastructure Platform Consumption Services for the second consecutive year.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is a presenting sponsor of Road to KubeCon. HPE Software helps IT organizations modernize infrastructure, streamline operations, and accelerate AI initiatives across hybrid, multi-vendor environments.
GreenLake, HPE’s cloud operations platform, helps teams monitor resource consumption, secure data, and manage infrastructure across data centers and private and public clouds. HPE points to recent additions, including agentic AI-powered operations, as part of the platform’s development.
Varma Kunaparaju, senior vice president and general manager of cloudops software and platform at HPE, says in the announcement: “We are building the operating model and platform for the agentic enterprise, giving customers the ability to simplify operations, govern intelligently, continuously optimize, and modernize without sacrificing choice.”
OpenTelemetry and Prometheus work better together
OpenTelemetry (OTel) and Prometheus are widely used for cloud-native monitoring and observability, often side by side. A new survey looks at how well that combination works.
Published Tuesday, the 2026 survey on Prometheus and OpenTelemetry interoperability found that nearly half of respondents mix Prometheus- and OTel-style instrumentation for infrastructure metrics. For application metrics, 30.7% use both.
While the two ecosystems haven’t always worked well together, the 2026 survey shows improvement: the average ease-of-use rating rose 0.5 points, from 3.1 to 3.6, while the share of those who find the two hard to use together fell from 29% to 10%.
As OTel contributors Dhruv Ahuja of SigNoz, Grafana Labs‘ Andrej Kiripolsky and Arthur Sens, and Ana Muenz share: “Two years of work on interoperability is paying off.”
There’s still work to do. Respondents want better alignment between the projects’ data models, better handling of resource attributes and metadata, and fewer naming and formatting issues.
Atlassian moves metrics from 100,000 hosts to OpenTelemetry
A case study on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) blog details how Atlassian migrated its metrics collection to OpenTelemetry from gostatsd, its open-source Go implementation of Etsy’s StatsD.
The original pipeline had worked for years, handling metrics from roughly 100,000 hosts across 14 regions, but was increasingly out of sync with the shift to OTel. “It became the thing everyone standardized on, and more and more of what fed our pipeline was emitting OTel data we simply didn’t support,” write Atlassian’s Iris Grace Endozo, Farzad Vazirnia and Albert Kerr.
To maintain continuity throughout the migration to OTel, Atlassian swapped the collection and pipeline mechanics underneath while keeping the service-facing interface unchanged. This turned an organization-wide overhaul into what the authors call a “platform-team migration.”
According to the authors, aggregation now uses about half the CPU for the same traffic. Operations are more unified through the OTel Collector, CPU usage is more evenly distributed across ingest shards, and sidecar costs are down roughly 30% at fleet scale.
New Relic finds observability gains — and gaps
On Tuesday, New Relic released its 2026 Observability Forecast, based on a survey of 2,575 IT and engineering leaders and practitioners. The report found that 73% are standardized on OTel, actively migrating to it, or testing it.
The report also looks at observability’s role in AI adoption. It found that 83% of respondents consider observability essential for AI-generated code. Organizations monitoring AI agents are twice as likely to report a threefold return on observability investment as those running agents without monitoring.
The study also paints a picture of the impact of outages. Engineers now report spending 37% of their time addressing disruptions, while 42% of organizations learn about disruptions through inefficient channels, like manual checks or customer complaints.
Outages take a business toll. New Relic found that organizations lose $74 million a year on average due to high-impact outages. That’s $1.85 million per hour, or over $30,000 for every minute a system is down.
The findings show why teams are looking for ways to detect and resolve problems faster as their systems grow more complex.
As Kubernetes evolves, so do the demands on the teams running it. Presenting sponsor HPE helps teams address that complexity with software spanning virtualization, cloud management, observability, and automation.
Observability Day returns to KubeCon
If you’re into observability and attending KubeCon NA, definitely check out the agenda for Observability Day, happening during the co-located events in Salt Lake on November 9.
OpenTelemetry’s graduation in May and growing production use give teams more experience to draw on as they adopt the standard.
New AI workloads, inference monitoring, and interoperability with other projects still present challenges. Those issues give practitioners plenty to compare notes on.
According to the Observability Day schedule, the agenda includes project updates and lessons from Capital One, Cisco, Nubank, and other organizations.
“Observability Day provides a vendor-neutral place for maintainers and practitioners to compare approaches and learn how the wider ecosystem is responding,” write Austin Parker, Iris Dyrmishi, Eduardo Silva Pereira, and Juraci Paixão Kröhling on the CNCF blog.
Komodor adds controls for agentic operations
Technically one we skipped last week, but potentially interesting vendor news nonetheless: Komodor, the site reliability engineering platform, announced its Komodor Agentic Operations Platform on Wednesday, September 16.
The additions let engineers deploy autonomous workflows and build or import agents under shared governance and context. Komodor says the release responds to the growing use of agents, including coding agents, and concerns about governance, return on investment, and costs.
“The hardest part of running agentic operations in production is not building the agents,” shares Itiel Shwartz, Komodor’s co-founder and CTO. Instead, the challenges lie in maintaining context, persistent memory, accuracy, security, and cost control — things the new Komodor release aims to address.
Spectro Cloud expands in the Middle East
The Middle East is an increasingly important technology market and a hotbed of data center construction. At the same time, data sovereignty and compliance requirements are driving interest in sovereign infrastructure.
This week, Spectro Cloud announced plans to expand in the Middle East, including new local partners and a dedicated regional office.
“The Middle East has bold ambitions for global AI leadership, from sovereign AI factories to AI-powered economies,” shared Tamer Riyal, Spectro Cloud’s sales director for the Middle East, in the announcement. “We’re investing in the regional expertise and partnerships to support that vision for the long term…”
The company aims to expand adoption of PaletteAI, its platform for managing AI infrastructure across sovereign clouds, enterprise data centers, and edge locations. The expansion reflects the region’s growing role in cloud-native infrastructure.
A father and son take the KubeCon stage
This week’s updates also have a personal side. Earlier this year, analyst, advisor, and TNS columnist Janakiram MSV co-presented a talk at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2026 with his son, Shreyas Mocherla, a CNCF Kubestronaut and software engineer at Nirmata.
As Mocherla describes on the CNCF blog in a post published this week: “Presenting alongside him made this special on a level that goes beyond the conference itself. I grew up watching him speak at technology events. Standing next to him at the same podium, in front of the KubeCon audience, felt like a full-circle moment.”
You can watch the talk, “Run Your Own AI Cluster on a DGX Spark: Kubernetes, GPUs, and DRA,” below:
It’s a reminder that the Kubernetes community’s connections can span generations as well as organizations.
Other updates from the K8s universe
More updates for the platform engineers and cloud operators working in the Kubernetes ecosystem:
- OpenTelemetry opens governance election: nominations due October 16, 2026.
- Kubernetes issues new security advisories: CVE-2026-2270 and CVE-2026-76654.
- Prometheus v3.15 enters release candidate, bringing performance improvements.
- Vector database Pinecone unveils GA for its Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC), allowing users to run Pinecone from AWS, GCP, or Azure accounts.
- Cilium publishes patch releases for its maintained 1.18, 1.19, and 1.20 branches.
Follow the Road to KubeCon
Road to KubeCon is an eight-part series presented by HPE, which will be at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Salt Lake City. Before you go, explore how HPE Software helps IT teams do more with less complexity.
We’ll be here every Friday until KubeCon.
If you’d like to participate, Bill Doerrfeld, the writer of this series, is open to pitches — you can send release notes, quotes, reports, videos, case studies, or hot takes through his contact page.
If you missed the previous editions covering Kubernetes v1.37 and AI inference, you can catch up through those links. Visit the Road to KubeCon page for the complete archive.
The post OpenTelemetry and Prometheus are getting along. What’s still missing? appeared first on The New Stack.
