OpenTelemetry (OTel) is now the industry standard for observability — but deploying it successfully at scale is still a major challenge. In this episode of OpenObservability Talks, we dive into the newly launched OpenTelemetry Blueprints initiative: a set of practical reference architectures designed to help Platform Engineering and SRE teams cut through the complexity.

We explore the first official blueprints for Kubernetes and traditional infrastructure environments, covering:

✅ How to standardize OTel Collector deployments

✅ Best practices for instrumentation at scale

✅ Building self-service observability platforms

✅ What these blueprints mean for Platform Engineering and SRE teams

Whether you're just starting your OpenTelemetry journey or trying to scale it across a large organization, this episode gives you a concrete, actionable framework to move faster and with more confidence.

You can read the recap post: https://medium.com/p/67db96d7e512/

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Show Notes:

00:00 - intro

03:05 - end-user pains with OpenTelemetry adoption

07:49 - enterprise org structure dictates OTel adoption patterns

12:56 - what’s the different between blueprints and reference implementations, and what can you expect of an OTel blueprint

19:46 - how blueprints balance OpenTelemetry’s flexibility with opinionation

23:11 - first blueprint: OpenTelemetry for traditional Environments, virtual machines, bare metal and non-Kubernetes

32:42 - second blueprint: OpenTelemetry for Kubernetes Workloads and managed telemetry

49:08 - third blueprint: Kubernetes monitoring with OpenTelemetry.

56:16 - roadmap for the OpenTelemettry blueprints initiative

1:00:01 - outro

Resources:

• OTel Blueprints: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/guidance/

• Blueprints intro blog: https://opentelemetry.io/blog/2026/blueprints-intro/

• OpAMP intro and updates: https://horovits.medium.com/operating-opentelemetry-at-scale-with-opamp-737b6af8222b

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Dotan Horovits

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Dan Gomez Blanco

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OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.