Can OpenTelemetry Save Observability in 2026?

OpenTelemetry has won the instrumentation wars with 95% adoption predicted for 2026. But winning data collection doesn't solve observability's real problems: spiraling costs, signal-to-noise ratios declining, and too much distance between seeing a problem and fixing it.

In this episode, we break down:
• Netflix's evolution to high-cardinality analytics processing 1M+ spans per episode
• The cost-control chokepoint that OTel enables for telemetry optimization
• Why 40% of organizations are targeting autonomous remediation by end of 2026
• How SLOs are becoming business conversations, not just engineering metrics

Plus news on GitHub Actions 39% pricing reduction and Jaeger v2.14.0 legacy removal.

Key takeaways:
→ OTel adoption is near-universal, but 43% haven't seen cost savings
→ Netflix treats observability as data engineering with Flink pipelines
→ AI agents becoming first-class consumers of observability data
→ Platform engineers becoming translators between telemetry and business impact

Full transcript and resources: https://platformengineering.playbook.com/docs/podcasts/00078-observability-opentelemetry-2026