Ecosystem Explorer: Spring 2026 Update

It feels overdue for another reflection and update on the Ecosystem Explorer. It’s been a busy stretch, and we’ve gotten a lot further than I expected since my last post. I also published a more holistic deep-dive and introduction over on opentelemetry.io: Introducing the OpenTelemetry Ecosystem Explorer.

What’s new

On the development side, we’ve had a surge of contributors, and therefore a lot more is being worked on than we can even keep up with in terms of reviews and issue triage.

The Java Agent Declarative Configuration Builder is now live, so users can browse Java agent instrumentations by version, toggle settings, and download a ready-to-use YAML config. It’s by far the most complicated feature on the site, and I’m excited to see it come together. The work was primarily led by Luca Cavenaghi, who is a newly appointed approver on the project and has been doing a fantastic job driving this feature forward.

While we continue moving forward building and tweaking the features ane ecosystems, Vitor Vasconcellos has been cooking up a significant V1 redesign of the UI. The foundation phase is wrapped up and Phase 2 is underway, and it’s starting to look awesome.

Since LLMs are so important to the future of the ecosystem, we’ve also been doing a lot of work to make sure the Explorer is ready to support AI agents and LLM-powered tooling. The Explorer is now AI agent-ready with some structured endpoints and an aggregated llms-full.txt for LLM tooling. We went from having an “F” grade to a “B” for some of the agent scoring tools. There is more work to be done as we learn more about how agents are using the data and what they need, but it’s a good start.

The project governance and team has been maturing too, as I mentioned before, Luca Cavenaghi was elevated to approver and Vitor was promoted to maintainer.

Expanding the ecosystem

We have several workstreams going on around exploring new ecosystems: .NET, JavaScript, Collector coverage, GenAI, Golang… and I’m spending a lot of time discussing and reviewing each one in isolation. One of the things I want to pause and step back to focus on is figuring out the right approach for onboarding a new ecosystem. So I need to do a deep dive retrospective on how I tackled Java and the lessons learned there, to create a more repeatable playbook for future ecosystems. Unfortunately it’s just a lot of work and I have a million other things in flight so I haven’t had the time to do it yet, but it’s on the roadmap.

LFX Mentorship

We have an LFX Mentorship project kicking off in a couple weeks, which I’m excited about.

The site is live at explorer.opentelemetry.io. If you want to get involved, the issue backlog and #otel-ecosystem-explorer on CNCF Slack are the best places to start.

Other updates

In other news, over the past few months I’ve been made maintainer of the Prometheus Java Client project, as well as maintainer of the OpenTelemetry Java Contrib project. I am honored to get to help shepherd these projects and work alongside other maintainers and contributors to keep improving the observability ecosystem.

I’m working on some exciting other things at Grafana Labs that I hope to write about soon. It’s going to be an exciting summer.