japnese survey blog v1

content/en/blog/2026/japanese-survey/index.md

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+---
+title: OpenTelemetry Japanese Community Survey
+linkTitle: OTel Japanese Survey
+date: 2026-04-15
+author: >-
+  "[Ernest Owojori](https://github.com/E-STAT), [Andrej Kiripolsky](https://github.com/andrejkiri), [Yoshifumi YAMAGUCHI](https://github.com/ymotongpoo) (Grafana Labs), [Austin Parker](https://github.com/austinlparker) (Honeycomb.io)"
+issue: 8985
+sig: End User
+# prettier-ignore
+cSpell:ignore: Parker Yoshifumi YAMAGUCHI  Kiripolsky Owojori  
+---
+
+This report presents findings from the OpenTelemetry Japanese Community Survey, conducted to understand the current landscape of OTel awareness, adoption, and community engagement among developers and engineers in Japan. The survey targeted practitioners across roles such as development, SRE, DevOps, and Platform Engineering, distributed through CNCF community channels and Japanese social platforms like X (formerly Twitter), [Qiita](https://qiita.com/), and Zenn. The goal was to develop data-driven strategies that can meaningfully grow OTel usage and engagement within Japan's tech ecosystem.
+
+## Key Takeaways
+
+- When it comes to OTel adoption, this survey reached a mature audience with 61.47% already running it in production and a further 25.69% under evaluation — together accounting for nearly 87% of respondents.
+- Traces dominate signal collection at 93%, contrary to global OTel surveys, where metrics typically lead.
+- The community is strongly satisfied, with an NPS of +49, though 27.37% remain passive — a conversion opportunity through better documentation and community engagement.
+- Go teams show the strongest adoption commitment, jumping from 39% in evaluation to 76% in production — the largest increase of any language.
+- 86% of respondents attend conferences, yet only 25% attended KubeCon Japan 2025, signalling significant untapped reach for future editions.
+- Twitter/X is the second most used information channel (83%), yet OpenTelemetry has no presence there nor in the popular local social platforms Zenn or Qiita. If we want to engage with the Japanese audience, we should consider addressing this.
+
+## Demographics and Background
+
+The respondent pool skews heavily toward **development teams** (44.95%), with SRE as the second-largest group (22.94%). DevOps, Platform Engineering, and Sales Engineering make up the remaining mid-tier, while Operations and dedicated Observability roles account for less than 7% combined. Geographically, the survey is strongly concentrated in the **Kanto region** (76.15%) — which includes Tokyo — with Kinki (Osaka/Kyoto area) at 12.84% being a distant second. This is unsurprising given Tokyo's dominance in Japan's tech industry, but it's worth acknowledging that the results may not fully represent the broader Japanese developer population outside these urban centres.
+
+On company size, the survey skews toward larger organisations: 44.04% come from mid-large companies (100–999 employees) and 35.78% from enterprises with over 1,000 employees. Small companies (1–49) account for just 14.68%. This is relevant because larger organisations tend to have more structured observability practices and the resources to evaluate and adopt tools like OTel.
+
+![image1](team-type.png)
+![image2](region.png)
+![image3](company-size.png)
+![image4](vendor.png)
+
+## OpenTelemetry Adoption
+
+### OTel Adoption Maturity
+
+The adoption story is broadly positive. A strong majority (61.47%) are already running OTel in production, while 25.69% are still in testing or evaluation. Only 12.84% have heard of it but haven't used it. Together, the "in production" and "under evaluation" cohorts account for nearly 87% of respondents, suggesting this survey reached an already engaged audience, which is typical when distributed through community channels.
+
+![image5](otel-adoption.png)
+
+### Telemetry Signals Collected
+
+**Traces** are the most widely collected signal at 93%, followed by Metrics (71%), Logs (60%), and Profiles, trailing significantly at just 13%. This is contrary to previous surveys within the OTel community, which have metrics leading usage.
+
+![image6](telemetry-signals.png)
+
+### Collector Distribution
+
+Among collector choices, the **Contrib Collector** is most popular at 59%, reflecting demand for the broader plugin ecosystem it provides. Core Collector and OCB (OpenTelemetry Collector Builder) are tied at 27% each. The OCB figure is notable, revealing that 27% of users are building custom distributions, suggesting a meaningful portion of the community has advanced, production-grade needs. Notably, mid-large companies (100–999 employees) account for half of all Contrib Collector users — a disproportionately high share compared to their representation in Core (23%) and OCB (32%). This likely reflects the fact that these organisations are complex enough to need Contrib's broad integration library, but have not yet reached the scale or platform engineering capacity to justify building and maintaining a fully custom OCB distribution.
+
+![image7](collector-distribution.png)
+![image8](collector-distribution-table.png)
+
+### Programming languages
+
+Java leads at 61%, followed closely by Go (57%) and JavaScript/TypeScript (50%). Python sits at 33%. Interestingly, the OTel Adoption vs Programming languages shows that out of the 28 evaluating and 67 running OTel, 39% and 76% are using Go, respectively. On the other hand, 71% of Java are evaluating OTel, and 69% are running it in production. This suggests that Go teams are particularly committed once they adopt OTel.
+
+![image9](programming-lang.png)
+![image10](otel-adoption-programming-lang.png)
+
+### Net Promoter Score (NPS)
+
+The NPS of approximately +49 (61.05% promoters minus 11.58% detractors) is a positive result for an open-source project. Over 6 in 10 respondents are enthusiastic advocates. That said, more than a quarter are passive, representing an opportunity to convert them through better documentation, community events, and success stories.
+
+![image11](nps.png)
+
+## IT Community and Events
+
+### Event Type Preferences
+
+A clear majority (64.22%) prefer **both in-person and virtual events**, indicating that a hybrid approach would best serve the community. Pure in-person preference sits at 22.02%, while virtual-only is 8.26%. Only 5.5% expressed no preference for either format. This strongly supports running hybrid events rather than choosing one mode exclusively.
+
+![image12](event-types.png)
+
+### Events Attended
+
+General IT **conferences** dominate attendance at 86%, which reflects Japan's active conference culture. KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Japan 2025, hands-on workshops, and technical deep dives each attracted 25% of respondents. Networking events (17%) and beginner tutorials (9%) are lower. If 86% of Japanese attend conferences, and just about 25% attended the previous (first-ever) KubeCon, that leaves room for lots of potential attendees for future events, and this makes us ask further questions: **what proportion of KubeCon absentees prefer virtual events?** As shown in the graph below, we found no relationship between the event choice and missing KubeCon. **Therefore, we suggest future KubeCon events to explore better ways to reach the Japanese community.**
+
+![image12](events-attended.png)
+![image13](events-table.png)
+
+## Information Sources
+
+**Official documentation** (85%), **Twitter/X** (83%), **GitHub** (81%), and **Blogs** (80%) are the four dominant information channels — all tightly clustered. Japanese-specific platforms Zenn (62%) and Qiita (39%) are notably significant, reflecting the importance of Japanese-language technical content. YouTube (19%) and LinkedIn (9%) are the least-used channels in this community. Given that OpenTelemetry does not currently have a Twitter/X account, this poses the question to the Governance Committee: **Do we open a Twitter/X account to reach Japanese or explore other local platforms?**
+
+![image14](information-sources.png)
+
+## Summary
+
+The survey paints a picture of a community that is **mature and engaged**. Most respondents already use OTel in production, broadly recommend it, and actively participate in the tech community through conferences and online platforms. The key opportunities lie in expanding reach beyond Kanto over time, focusing on current events in the Kanto region, nurturing the 25% still in evaluation, growing Japanese-language documentation, calling for social reach for the Japanese, and running hybrid events that serve both the in-person and virtual segments of the community.
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