Adriana Villela of Dynatrace takes on OpenTelemetry community manager role

Dynatrace principal developer advocate Adriana Villela is stepping up her involvement with the OpenTelemetry® community. As of today, she will be taking on the role of OpenTelemetry community manager, alongside Reese Lee of New Relic. They are joined by Julia Furst Morgado, of Dash0, who will serve as associate community manager, and will be taking over the role from Austin Parker of Honeycomb.

Community managers are appointed by the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee and act as public stewards of the contributor and end-user community. They’re responsible for organizing events, coordinating efforts to improve contributor experience, managing the OpenTelemetry presence on social media, and working to nurture and grow the OpenTelemetry community overall. Effectively, this is a project-maintainer role whose project is the OpenTelemetry community itself.

“I’m thrilled, then, that Adriana and Reese have stepped up to not only continue growing our community management role, but invest time in helping scope and shape this function for the project as it enters into its next era of growth,” said Austin in the official announcement, which was also made at OTel Unplugged in Brussels, Belgium, on February 2nd, 2026.

“As a community manager, I want to continue to raise the OpenTelemetry community profile within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and within the greater open source community,” Adriana says.

The path to OpenTelemetry community leadership

Adriana’s journey with the OpenTelemetry community began in 2021 when she worked for Tucows, where she managed the platform engineering and observability teams. “I had dabbled a bit in observability when I was at my previous job as a release engineer at Ceridian, but when I stepped in as manager of the observability team at Tucows, to do right by my team and the organization, so I could lead them in the right direction,” she says. “I learned as much as I could about observability and OpenTelemetry projects, and I did it in public.” She documented her learnings in her Unpacking Observability series on Medium.

While at Tucows, Adriana made it her mission to move away from vendor lock-in and towards OpenTelemetry tools. But 2021 was still early days for the project. For example, traces weren’t yet generally available. To learn more about how to expand OpenTelemetry project use in a large enterprise, she connected with OpenTelemetry project co-founder Ted Young, then director of open source development at Lightstep, and Honeycomb field CTO Liz Fong-Jones, then developer advocate at Honeycomb. “Both Liz and Ted put aside their competitor differences to jump on a Q&A call with Tucows developers to answer their questions and concerns about OTel,” Adriana recalls.

Adriana’s writings caught Austin’s eye in 2022, and they hired her for her first developer relations role. As part of the role, she was encouraged to contribute to the OpenTelemetry community. When one of the original founders of the OpenTelemetry End User Working Group (later converted to a special interest group or SIG) left the project in 2023, Ted and Austin asked Adriana to help lead the group alongside Reese.

Together, Adriana and Reese raised the End User SIG’s profile by running monthly Open Telemetry livestreams, launched the Humans of Open Telemetry series, and collaborated with various other SIGs to gather end-user feedback through surveys. She also contributed to the CNCF OpenTelemetry Certified Associate (OTCA) certification.

The OpenTelemetry community has advanced significantly since Adriana began her exploration of the project, and it only continues to evolve. She points to the work around the Open Agent Management Protocol (OpAMP) for managing data collection agents such as the OpenTelemetry Collector, and the increased emphasis on the quality of telemetry data. Over the years, most of the major observability vendors have embraced OpenTelemetry tooling, both by supporting its data ingest format, OTLP, natively, and as by contributing to OpenTelemetry projects, making it the standard for instrumentation. “That tells me that it’s here to stay,” she says. “I can’t wait to see where the community takes it next.”

Reflections from the OpenTelemetry community on Villela’s impact

Comments from Adriana Villela’s fellow contributors on her engagement with the OTel community:

“Adriana is a tireless and omnipresent anchor of the OpenTelemetry community, whether it’s educating, building, or the organizing the end user SIG. My entry into the community was easy thanks to her efforts, and I’m sure countless others could say the same.”

— Josh Lee, Open Source Evangelist at Altinity

“I met Adriana at the very first OTel Unplugged in 2022, and together we developed the End User Working Group from a 3-person task force to the bigger and better End User SIG it is today (we’ve since added 2 more Maintainers!). I’m so stoked to be moving to the next stage of OTel community work alongside Adriana.”

— Reese Lee, Developer Relations Engineer and incoming OTel Community Manager, New Relic

“Adriana has a unique voice in the OpenTelemetry community, addressing current both end user and community challenges. Through her technical work and her public contributions in the open source observability ecosystem, Adriana connects with a wider audience: from developers to platform engineers or first time contributors. Her blog posts, conference talks and podcasts, help practitioners understand not just how OpenTelemetry works, but why it works the way it does, creating a trail of useful resources that anybody can use for onboarding or deepening specific topics.”

— Diana Todea, Developer Experience Engineer and OpenTelemetry contributor, Victoria Metrics