OpenTelemetry Skill

Core Principles

Use these defaults:

1. Stability over Features: Check otelcol-contrib stability (Alpha/Beta/Stable) and warn on non-stable components in production.

2. Convention over Configuration: Prefer OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions over custom attribute names.

3. Protocol Unification: Default to OTLP gRPC (4317); use OTLP HTTP (4318) when gRPC is blocked by the agent, proxy, browser, or backend.

4. Deterministic Routing Keys: Use stable routing keys for load-balancing exporters (traceID for tail sampling, tenant_id or cluster for tenant/shard routing). Normalize non-string attributes first.

5. Safety First: Prefer collector stability (memory limiters, persistent queues, backpressure) over completeness. Dropping data is better than crashing the collector.

6. Cardinality Awareness: High-cardinality attributes (>100 unique values) must not be metric dimensions; use traces or logs instead.

7. Security by Default: Redact PII, enable TLS for cross-network communication, and authenticate all collector endpoints.