The New Stack Makers

Morgan McLean, co-founder of OpenTelemetry and senior director of product management at Splunk, has long tackled the challenges of observability in large-scale systems. In a conversation with Alex Williams onThe New Stack Makers, McLean reflected on his early frustrations debugging high-scale services and the need for better observability tools.OpenTelemetry, formed in 2019 from OpenTracing and OpenCensus, has since become a key part of modern observability strategies. As a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) incubating project, it’s the second most active open source project after Kubernetes, with over 1,200 developers contributing monthly. McLean highlighted OpenTelemetry’s role in solving scaling challenges, particularly in Kubernetes environments, by standardizing distributed tracing, application metrics, and data extraction.Looking ahead, profiling is set to become the fourth major observability signal alongside logs, tracing, and metrics, with general availability expected in 2025. McLean emphasize