Get your new high quality OTel Icons! Read More

Icons of OTel: A Free Icon Pack for the Observability Community

July 22, 2025
By Jon Reeve
Share Bluesky-logo X-twitter-logo Linkedin-logo Youtube-logo
Picture showing icons of OTel
Today, we’re launching Icons of OTel—a free, community-powered icon pack designed to make your observability stories clearer, sharper, and hopefully a little more fun!

Custom-designed icons for your dashboards, docs, slides—and memes.

OpenTelemetry adoption is surging across the industry, but visual storytelling hasn’t quite kept up. Too often, we see complex observability architectures sketched with generic boxes and arrows, or hastily labeled diagrams that confuse more than they clarify.

So we decided to do something about it.

Today, we’re launching Icons of OTel—a free, community-powered icon pack designed to make your observability stories clearer, sharper, and a hopefully little more fun!

➡️ Download the icon pack here


What’s Inside

This first version includes:

  • ✅ 18+ high-quality, OpenTelemetry-inspired vector icons
  • ✅ SVG and PNG formats for easy drag-and-drop into docs and tools
  • ✅ Styles for both color and black and white icons
  • ✅ Community-requested symbols like:
    • “Collector”
    • “Receivers” and “Exporters”
    • “Agent” vs “Gateway” deployment modes
    • “Pipelines,” “Processors,” and more

Whether you’re diagramming collector topologies, explaining pipelines to a new teammate, or just making your slide deck look less like clip art from 2002—these icons are here to help!


Why We Made This

At ControlTheory, we work with platform engineers, DevOps leads, SREs, architects and developers who are pushing OpenTelemetry to its limits—and trying to explain it to the rest of their teams.

We’ve sat in on a lot of whiteboarding sessions, architectural reviews, and incident postmortems. And we saw the same thing at the recent Observability Summit / OTel Community Day in Denver: amazing presentations full of hard-won insights, and we were inspired to make even better with amazing OTel icons!

So we started designing our own internal icon set. And soon enough, teammates and community members were asking for them too. Now we’re making them available to everyone—free and open, just like OTel itself.

Picture showing a possible use of OTel icons

How to Get the Icons

It’s simple:
➡️ Grab the icon pack here

Just drop in your email and you’ll get instant access to the full bundle.

We’ll only use your email to access the icons—and maybe a nerdy observability follow-up or two.


What Should We Add Next?

This is just v1. We’re planning more icons and refinements—but we want your input.

Want icons for specific processors? OTTL functions? Maybe a dancing traceparent header?

You can leave ideas in the download form—or shoot us a note. We’re building this with the community, for the community.


License

These icons are released under CC0 1.0.
Use them freely in personal, commercial, or open-source projects.
No attribution required (though if you shout us out, we’ll be extra happy!).


➡️  Download the Icons of OTel pack now

And make your observability stories a little easier to understand—and a lot more fun.

For media inquiries, please contact
press@controltheory.com