Creating Your Own Conventions

Correlation is one of the most important parts of observability. Distributed tracing bring correlation by propagating trace context, allowing us to follow individual operations, and consistent attributes enable correlation across traces and other telemetry signals.

In Chapter 9, Best Practices, we talked about the importance of reusing standard attributes and following OpenTelemetry semantic conventions. Sometimes we need to go further and define our own conventions. Here, we’re going to explore how to define custom attributes and conventions and use them across the system.

First, we’ll list properties that should be standardized across the system, and then we’ll explore how to populate them with shared code. Finally, we’ll look at OpenTelemetry’s semantic convention schema and see how it can simplify documenting and validating custom conventions.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to do the following:

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