Staying consistent with semantic conventions

One of the most important questions we’re yet to discuss is what information to add to telemetry signals to make them useful – this is where OpenTelemetry semantic conventions come into play.

Semantic conventions describe what information to collect for specific technologies, such as HTTP or gRPC calls, database operations, messaging scenarios, serverless environments, runtime metrics, resource attributes, and so on.

Semantic conventions are part of the OpenTelemetry specification and have been published in the specification repository at https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification. They apply to all instrumentations authored by the OpenTelemetry project.

Note

At the time of writing, semantic conventions are in an experimental status. The community is actively working on stabilization and the attributes I use in this book will likely be renamed or changed in other ways.

The goal of semantic...