OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation 2026 Goals

By Tyler Yahn (Splunk) |

As we kick off 2026, the OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation SIG has come together to set an ambitious roadmap for the year. Our focus is on achieving production readiness with a stable 1.0 release while expanding protocol and language support to serve a broader range of use cases. We’re also strengthening integration with OpenTelemetry APIs and SDKs to support hybrid instrumentation approaches. For those new to OBI, check out the documentation link above to learn more about zero-code observability using eBPF.

Goals

Here’s an overview of our priorities for 2026 and the key contributors supporting each initiative.

Stable 1.0 release

Achieving a stable 1.0 release is our flagship goal for 2026. This milestone represents OBI’s readiness for production deployments and serves as the foundation for all other initiatives. The path to 1.0 focuses on three critical areas: comprehensive documentation, configuration standardization, and production-readiness validation.

We’re building out complete documentation for all configuration options, including JSON Schema definitions that enable validation and autocomplete in modern editors. As the OpenTelemetry community stabilizes declarative configuration standards, OBI will adopt these standards to ensure consistent configuration across the entire OpenTelemetry ecosystem. This includes support for per-service and per-process configuration, allowing fine-grained control over telemetry collection in complex environments.

The 1.0 release also includes adopting telemetry schemas, comprehensive versioning documentation, and achieving our targeted test coverage thresholds. These investments ensure OBI can be confidently deployed in production environments where reliability and stability are paramount.

Expanding protocol support

While OBI currently supports HTTP, gRPC, and SQL protocols, modern applications rely on a diverse ecosystem of communication patterns. This goal expands OBI’s protocol coverage to include messaging systems, NoSQL databases, and cloud service SDKs.

For messaging systems, we’re adding support for MQTT, AMQP, NATS, and Redis pub/sub, enabling observability for event-driven architectures and microservices that communicate asynchronously. On the database side, we’re extending support for MongoDB, including compression and support for legacy versions. We’re also enhancing gRPC instrumentation with full context propagation support.

Perhaps most significantly, we’re working on instrumenting cloud service SDKs for Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure. This will provide visibility into cloud API calls, helping teams understand their applications’ interactions with cloud infrastructure and identify performance bottlenecks in distributed cloud native systems.

Supporting .NET

.NET represents one of the last major language ecosystems OBI needs to fully support. Early testing shows promising results with .NET 9 and later versions, and we’re focused on expanding and validating this support across the .NET ecosystem.

Our work includes determining the supported version range, both modern .NET (versions 8+) and .NET Framework (versions 4.x and 3.5 SP1), and ensuring context propagation works reliably across all supported versions. We’re building comprehensive integration tests to validate distributed tracing and RED metrics (Rate, Errors, Duration) collection, ensuring .NET applications receive the same level of observability as other supported languages.

This expansion is particularly important for enterprises with significant .NET investments, providing them with zero-code observability that integrates seamlessly with their existing OpenTelemetry infrastructure.

Hybrid instrumentation with OTel APIs/SDKs

Many organizations are adopting a hybrid approach to instrumentation, combining zero-code eBPF instrumentation with manual instrumentation using OpenTelemetry APIs and SDKs. This goal ensures these approaches work together seamlessly, providing added value rather than conflicts or duplicate telemetry.

We’re developing capabilities for OBI to wrap SDK-generated traces, ensuring request timing information remains accurate regardless of instrumentation source. We’re also working on consistent labeling between OBI and SDK telemetry, metric exemplars that reference trace information from either source, and the ability to combine manual instrumentation with auto-instrumentation across all supported languages (building on what’s already available for Go).

This hybrid approach is particularly valuable in gradually adopting observability: teams can start with zero-code eBPF instrumentation for immediate visibility, then add manual instrumentation for business-specific insights without needing to choose one approach over the other.

Additional focus areas

Beyond these four major goals, we’re also prioritizing several supporting initiatives that strengthen OBI’s integration with the broader OpenTelemetry ecosystem. We’re aligning network attributes with OpenTelemetry semantic conventions and updating all semantic convention usage to the latest versions. We’re also building an OpenTelemetry Collector distribution with OBI as a receiver, integrating with the OpenTelemetry eBPF profiler for unified observability, and providing runtime metrics directly from OBI. For the complete list of 2026 goals, check out our full roadmap.

Join the conversation

These goals represent our priorities based on community feedback and project maturity. We’d love to hear whether these areas address your use cases or if you see gaps we should consider. Your input helps shape OBI’s development and ensures we’re building features that matter most to real-world deployments.

Here’s how you can get involved:

Acknowledgments

OBI’s progress toward production readiness is the result of collaboration across a global, multi-vendor community of contributors. Thank you to everyone who has contributed code, documentation, testing, feedback, and enthusiasm to make this project possible. We’re excited to work with the community to achieve these goals and bring production-ready zero-code observability to the OpenTelemetry ecosystem!

Last modified January 23, 2026: OBI 2026 goals blog post (#8969) (a1dda511)