Splunk Advances OpenTelemetry Experience with New Innovations to Boost Digital Resilience

Splunk the cybersecurity and observability leader, today announced new innovations to deliver a seamless OpenTelemetry experience that offers organizations flexibility, customization, and freedom from vendor lock-in with no manual setup. With the introduction of these new capabilities, Splunk provides a more intuitive, simplified OpenTelemetry experience – ensuring organizations can seamlessly integrate open-source observability into their software delivery and build a leading observability practice.

Nearly 60% of surveyed organizations say their primary observability solution relies on OpenTelemetry, making it a critical framework to advance business operations. Recognizing the great advantages of OpenTelemetry, Splunk made it the foundation of its Splunk Observability Cloud solution and continued to innovate to ensure organizations benefit from the framework’s vendor-neutral telemetry with unmatched ease of use. These new solutions include Service Inventory, enhanced capabilities for Kubernetes troubleshooting, and expanded support for automatic setup of OpenTelemetry instrumentation for applications.

Simplifying OpenTelemetry Adoption with Service Inventory and Expanded Automation

Service Inventory addresses the operational challenges of large-scale observability building on infrastructure inventory, automatic discovery and automatic configuration. This new capability:

● Provides end-to-end visibility – Automatically detects all third-party applications, like databases and message queues.

● Guides users through configuration – Provides step-by-step recommendations for seamless OpenTelemetry setup.

● Identifies and resolves visibility gaps – Highlights missing instrumentation, allowing enterprises to proactively address blind spots across their infrastructure.

“Splunk customers benefit from OpenTelemetry’s full power, with a frictionless experience that ensures complete visibility, so they can attain flexibility and ownership of their data,” said Morgan McLean, OpenTelemetry Co-founder and Senior Director of Product Management at Splunk, a Cisco company. “OpenTelemetry should be effortless to use, and Splunk is committed to making that a reality with the introduction of Service Inventory and expanded automation. These enhancements give customers the power to build a leading observability practice with the ability to instrument and monitor their environments without the complexity of manual configuration.”

Deepening Kubernetes Observability and OpenTelemetry Support

Splunk enhanced its Kubernetes monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities to further enrich visibility and empower teams to quickly detect and resolve issues within Kubernetes clusters, reducing downtime and improving performance.

Further strengthening Splunk’s OpenTelemetry offering, the company is rolling out OpenTelemetry Python 2.0 and Node.js 3.0, delivering greater flexibility and improved performance for cloud-native applications. 

“OpenTelemetry is rapidly becoming the industry standard for building an effective observability practice, but complex instrumentation remains a significant barrier. Splunk’s latest innovations have the potential to make its adoption more seamless than ever,” said Archana Venkatraman, Senior Research Director, Cloud Data Management, IDC Europe. “Cloud-native and Kubernetes strategies are becoming mainstream, requiring enterprise-grade management. Amid this, by automating instrumentation and deepening Kubernetes troubleshooting, Splunk continues to make OpenTelemetry a practical and powerful solution for digital enterprises.”

Cisco & Splunk: Better Together in OpenTelemetry

As part of Cisco, Splunk continues to champion OpenTelemetry adoption. Cisco ThousandEyes and Splunk AppDynamics natively support OpenTelemetry, enabling a seamless observability experience across the entire IT stack. As the first assurance solution to support OpenTelemetry, Cisco ThousandEyes allows customers to infer correlations between digital experience health and observability metrics for end-to-end visibility that helps solve problems quicker, and get services restored and running faster. Splunk AppDynamics provides an OpenTelemetry-compatible backend to ingest trace data using OpenTelemetry components and leverages Splunk AppDynamics agents to produce OpenTelemetry data for easy consumption by Splunk Observability Cloud.

Availability

● Service Inventory is available globally for all Splunk Observability Cloud customers.

● Kubernetes troubleshooting enhancements and expanded OpenTelemetry language support are available globally.

To learn more about Splunk’s OpenTelemetry initiatives, visit us at KubeCon EMEA 2025 (booth N290) or online at splunk.com. Visit Cisco ThousandEyes and Splunk AppDynamics to learn more about how they offer native OpenTelemetry support.