Semantic Conventions

Status: Development

The Semantic Conventions define the keys and values which describe commonly observed concepts, protocols, and operations used by applications.

OpenTelemetry defines its semantic conventions in a separate repository: https://github.com/open-telemetry/semantic-conventions.

Reserved Attributes

Semantic conventions MUST provide the following attributes:

  • Resource
    • service.name
    • telemetry.sdk.language
    • telemetry.sdk.name
    • telemetry.sdk.version
  • Event
    • exception.escaped
    • exception.message
    • exception.stacktrace
    • exception.type

In-development Reserved Attributes

Semantic conventions MUST provide the following attributes:

  • Resource
    • server.address
    • server.port
    • service.instance.id
    • url.scheme

Reserved Namespace

The otel.* namespace is reserved for defining compatibility with non-opentelemetry technologies.