OpenTelemetry Best Practices

Treat spans as operation records and named log records as occurrence records. Put safe, bounded, operationally useful inputs, final outputs, and outcomes on the span that represents the operation. Emit a named log event only for a meaningful point-in-time occurrence. Do not infer one signal from another.

Use an established OpenTelemetry semantic convention before defining an application attribute. Keep custom policy visibly separate from OpenTelemetry requirements, and keep telemetry useful across languages, SDKs, collectors, and backends.

Treat this guidance as language-agnostic. Adapt illustrative JavaScript SDK examples to the target language's official OpenTelemetry APIs, native exception chaining, and resource-management conventions.

Core Conventions