OpenTelemetry is vast. The Java agent alone includes over 240 different auto-instrumentations. The Collector has hundreds of components. Python, JavaScript, Go, and .NET each have their own ecosystems of instrumentation libraries, each with its own patterns and conventions.
In our 2025 Developer Experience Survey, users said that “documentation is difficult to navigate, requiring users to switch between the OpenTelemetry website and GitHub repositories” and that they often have to “piece together information from various sources.” Only about half of users rely on opentelemetry.io as their primary resource; the rest turn to GitHub, vendor documentation, or wherever they can find answers.