Blueprints and reference implementations

Adopting OpenTelemetry at scale is not just a matter of configuring individual components. It requires coordinated decisions across teams and systems. The official project documentation explains how specific pieces of OpenTelemetry work, but many adopters need help connecting those pieces into a cohesive, production-ready architecture.

This section provides high-level guidance and architectural patterns for designing and operating OpenTelemetry in real-world environments. It focuses on the challenges organizations face and maps these challenges to proven approaches and best practices you can apply in your own environment.

There is no single “correct” way to deploy OpenTelemetry, so this guidance aims to address all organizational structures, not to force a specific one. With this flexibility in mind, you can find two types of reference documents in this section:

• Blueprints are living documents that solve common adoption and implementation challenges in a given environment. Each blueprint is tightly scoped to address specific challenges, so you might need to refer to multiple blueprints, depending on your environment.
• Reference implementations are snapshots in time that show how real-world organizations use OpenTelemetry to build scalable, resilient pipelines that send application telemetry to observability backends.

How to contribute

If your organization has implemented OpenTelemetry and you think others could benefit from your experience, or you want to propose a blueprint to share best practices for adopting OpenTelemetry in a new environment, we want to hear from you!

You can propose a new blueprint or reference implementation by raising an issue in the End User SIG repository using the following issue templates:

• Blueprint
• Reference Implementation

End User SIG members will guide you through the process, from helping you craft a high-quality document following our standard templates, to ultimately making your contribution to the official documentation.