If you’ve landed on this blog, you’re likely either considering starting your OpenTelemetry journey or you are well on your way. As OpenTelemetry adoption has grown, not only within the observability community but also internally at Grafana Labs and among our users, we frequently get requests around how to best implement an OpenTelemetry strategy.

Incidents almost never happen in a vacuum. When you receive an alert about a potential issue, odds are pretty good that you’ll need to navigate between different tools and teams to get things resolved. Of course, timing is critical in these situations, so the easier it is to communicate — between both tools and teams — the better off you’ll be.

How do you know that your open source project has been enthusiastically adopted by the community? A) Engineers give you a raucous standing ovation when a feature is revealed. B) People form a long line to meet you at an industry event. C) Every time there is a release, social media notifications blow up your phone. If you’re Grafana founder Torkel Ödegaard, the answer is D) all of the above.

Five years ago today, Grafana Loki was introduced to the world on the KubeconNA 2018 stage when David Kaltschmidt, now a Senior Director of Engineering at Grafana Labs, clicked the button to make the Loki repo public live in front of the sold-out crowd. At the time, Loki was a prototype: We bolted together Grafana as a UI, Cortex internals, and Prometheus labels to find out if there was a need for a new open source tool to manage logs.