OpenTelemetry is a vendor-neutral open-source (CNCF) observability framework that is supported by many vendors industry-wide. It is used for instrumenting, generation, collection, and exporting of data within systems which then are ingested by analytics tools that can provide tracing, metrics, and logs. It has long been the plan to adopt the OTel standard within Airflow, allowing builders and users to take advantage of valuable data that could help improve the efficiency, cost and performance of their systems. Let us talk about the journey that started a few years ago to bring this dream to reality.