Chapter 14 – Creating Your Own Conventions

1. A possible solution is to define and document the stability level for attributes.

For example, new conventions are always added at the alpha stability level. Once it’s fully implemented and deployed, and you’re mostly happy with the outcome, the convention can be graduated to beta.

Conventions should stay in beta until someone tries to use them for alerts, reports, or dashboards. If it works fine, or after feedback is addressed, the convention becomes stable. After that, it cannot be changed in a breaking manner.

2. It should be possible to validate actual telemetry to some extent.

For example, it should be possible to write a test processor (an in-process one or a custom collector component) that identifies specific spans, events, or metrics that should follow the convention and checks whether the conventions are applied consistently. This test processor could warn about issues found, flag unknown...