---
title: OpenTelemetry on Mainframe Priorities Survey
linkTitle: Mainframe Priorities Survey
date: 2025-01-31
author: '[Ruediger Schulze](https://github.com/rrschulze) (IBM)'
canonical_url: https://openmainframeproject.org/blog/opentelemetry-on-mainframe-priorities-survey/
issue: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry.io/issues/6045
sig: SIG OpenTelemetry on Mainframe
cSpell:ignore: Ruediger Schulze
---

The [OpenTelemetry](/) project and
[The Open Mainframe Project](https://openmainframeproject.org/) established the
[SIG “OpenTelemetry on Mainframe”](https://github.com/open-telemetry/sig-mainframe)
at the beginning of 2024. Our focus is to enable OpenTelemetry on the mainframe
for improved end-to-end observability and to support mainframe participation in
hybrid cloud applications. **The SIG launched a new [survey][] that calls for
your participation.**

## Background

While there are many definitions of observability, we will refer here to the
ability to receive actionable insight about the behavior of hybrid applications
spanning multiple landing zones such as public and private cloud and mainframe
environments.

OpenTelemetry is a well-adopted open source framework for observability that
aims to make high quality telemetry data such as traces, metrics, and logs
available from any source to any target. OpenTelemetry remains the second most
active project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The community
of the OpenTelemetry project has made major efforts to provide specifications
and implementations that unify the collection, processing, and distribution of
telemetry.

Given the breadth of the OpenTelemetry project and sophisticated capabilities of
the mainframe, we as contributors to the SIG want to better understand the
priorities for making the best use of OpenTelemetry on the mainframes. We seek
feedback from a broad range of mainframe users and users of observability
solutions, developers, site reliability engineers, application owners,
architects, DevOps engineers, and all other experts in the field.

The results of the [survey][] will help us prioritize and implement targeted
activities to accelerate the adoption of OpenTelemetry on the mainframe
platform. Such activities could be the expedited porting of selected SDKs for
code instrumentation to z/OS or the definition of Semantic Conventions for
specific aspects of the platform. Once the survey is complete, we will publish
the results and a prioritized list of activities on the websites of the
OpenTelemetry project and The Open Mainframe Project.

## Taking the survey

The [survey][] is structured in two sections. The first section gathers input
about your role and background. The second section gathers the priorities of
your organization for enabling OpenTelemetry on mainframes. Responding to the 20
questions will take approximately 15 minutes. We appreciate your time spent on
the survey and look forward to receiving your feedback!

We invite you to take the [survey][]. To learn more about the work of the
OpenTelemetry on Mainframe SIG, join the conversation at
[#otel-mainframes](https://cloud-native.slack.com/archives/C05PXDFTCPJ) on
[CNCF Slack](https://slack.cncf.io/).

_A version of this article was [originally posted][] on the Open Mainframe
Project blog._

[originally posted]: <{{% param canonical_url %}}>
[survey]: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HGTD2KJ
