Announcing the Elastic Common Schema (ECS) and OpenTelemetry Semantic Convention Convergence

By Reiley Yang |

Today, we’re very excited to make a joint announcement with Elastic about the future of Elastic Common Schema (ECS) and the OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions.

The goal is to achieve convergence of ECS and OTel Semantic Conventions into a single open schema that is maintained by OpenTelemetry, so that OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions truly is a successor of the Elastic Common Schema. OpenTelemetry shares the same interest of improving the convergence of observability and security in this space. We believe this schema merge brings huge value to the open source community because:

  • ECS has years of proven success in the logs, metrics, traces and security events schema, providing great coverage of the common problem domains.
  • ECS provides schema for security domain fields, which is an important aspect of telemetry.
  • Converging two separate standards into one single standard will help to boost the ecosystem (e.g. instrumentation libraries, tools and consumption experiences), which benefits both the telemetry producers and consumers.
  • This joint effort would benefit from domain experts across logging, distributed tracing, metrics and security events. As a result, we expect to have more consistent signals across different pillars of observability and security events.

Both Elastic and the OpenTelemetry community understand that converging two widely used standards into one singular common schema, and having a smooth transition is critical for users. A dedicated OpenTelemetry Semantic Convention working group will be created with domain experts from both Elastic and OpenTelemetry joining. We’re also welcoming domain experts who are passionate about data schemas and semantic conventions to join us. If you’re interested in contributing, join our OTel Semantic Conventions working group, and join the discussion on our Slack channel.

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Last modified July 27, 2023: Normalize cSpell front-matter dictionnaires (#3093) (11f476e6)