The Humans of OpenTelemetry - KubeCon Japan 2026

By Yoshi Yamaguchi (Grafana Labs) |

We’re back with our fifth edition of Humans of OpenTelemetry, and for the first time, from Japan! At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Japan 2026 in Yokohama, I interviewed OpenTelemetry end users and practitioners from the Japanese cloud native community, and learned how they got involved with OTel:

The interviews were conducted in Japanese, and the transcript below is an English translation. We’ll add the video recording to this post once it’s published.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to OpenTelemetry to date. We look forward to your continued contributions in 2026 and beyond! 🎉

Transcript

Here’s what they had to say.

1- Meet the Humans of OTel

YUZURU OHIRA: I’m Yuzuru Ohira. I work as an engineering manager at LayerX.

MIKATA CHIKAHISA: My name is Mikata, and I’m an SRE at Loglass.

YOSHIKI FUJIKANE: My name is Yoshiki Fujikane, and I work as a platform engineer.

TAKASHI OKAMOTO: I’m Takashi Okamoto, an AI strategist at NTT DATA.

KOHEI SUGIMOTO: My name is Kohei Sugimoto, and I’m an SRE at MIXI.

2- How did you get involved in OpenTelemetry?

YUZURU OHIRA: I used to work at an observability company, where I worked on OpenTelemetry, and I’ve stayed involved by actually using OpenTelemetry at my current company.

MIKATA CHIKAHISA: We had a project to introduce the Grafana stack, and that was my first encounter with OpenTelemetry.

YOSHIKI FUJIKANE: To improve observability on the platform we run internally, we use SaaS tools like Datadog, and we’re now at the stage where we want to adopt the OpenTelemetry Collector in particular. We’re currently in the evaluation phase, and starting to use it for that evaluation is what got me involved.

TAKASHI OKAMOTO: When we first started with observability, every vendor was doing things differently, but then it got standardized with OpenTelemetry. I thought that was great, and that’s what got me involved.

KOHEI SUGIMOTO: While using observability SaaS products, I was looking for something that would fit us better, and that’s when I came across OpenTelemetry.

3- What is the meaning of observability?

YUZURU OHIRA: To me, it’s part of the system architecture — something you design as part of the architecture of the code you write.

MIKATA CHIKAHISA: I think of it as essential information for showing the health status of a system.

YOSHIKI FUJIKANE: Observability is one of the essential keys to operating a system. As you develop services of all sizes, years go by and knowledge about those services fades away. Even so, you can continuously collect signals from the system and use them to understand the system as a black box, which I find valuable from an operations standpoint. In that sense, I feel observability is something we truly need.

TAKASHI OKAMOTO: Observability is like a peephole that lets you see everything in the system — the bad parts and the good parts.

KOHEI SUGIMOTO: I think it’s a means to correctly understand your system and improve it in the right direction.

4- What is OpenTelemetry to you?

YUZURU OHIRA: OpenTelemetry is the most fundamental way of thinking when designing observability, so for me it’s like a textbook — I refer to what OpenTelemetry implements when building my own implementations.

MIKATA CHIKAHISA: I think of it as the standard rules and specifications for expressing the health status of a system.

YOSHIKI FUJIKANE: What is OpenTelemetry to me? That’s a really hard one. For me, at this point, it’s a fascinating thing to experiment with.

TAKASHI OKAMOTO: OpenTelemetry is what feeds that peephole — it carries all kinds of data: metrics, logs, and traces. So it’s a pipe. Well, calling it a “hole” would be rude — it’s a pipe.

KOHEI SUGIMOTO: Observability comes with a lot of difficulties, and I think OpenTelemetry is something that gives us a guiding principle amid all that.

5- What is your favorite telemetry signal?

YUZURU OHIRA: I love tracing.

MIKATA CHIKAHISA: Traces. I believe traces are the foundation of everything — the first, most important core part — so I really love traces.

YOSHIKI FUJIKANE: My favorite signal would be traces. Personally, I really enjoy learning how systems work, so a signal that tells me what behavior occurred inside the system and what happened as a result fits me best. That’s why I chose traces.

TAKASHI OKAMOTO: Rather than a signal per se — I’ve been working on observability for AI agents lately, so I like the Generative AI semantic conventions.

KOHEI SUGIMOTO: Metrics. Among the many kinds of telemetry data, metrics can nicely absorb the others and contribute to things like cost optimization and summarization.

Wrapping up

This was the first Humans of OpenTelemetry from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Japan. Each person came to OpenTelemetry by a different path: working at an observability vendor, introducing the Grafana stack, evaluating the Collector, welcoming a common standard across vendors, and looking for a better fit than SaaS tools. Traces were the favorite signal for three of the five, with metrics and the Generative AI semantic conventions also getting some love.

Many thanks to Yuzuru, Mikata, Yoshiki, Takashi, and Kohei for sharing their stories. We hope to bring Humans of OpenTelemetry back to Japan at future events!

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Last modified October 15, 2026: Add blog post: The Humans of OpenTelemetry - KubeCon Japan 2026 (#11451) (219389e0)