open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification resource

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

4325 stars · 996 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

The canonical specification for OpenTelemetry, defining cross-language requirements and expectations for all OpenTelemetry implementations covering traces, metrics, logs, baggage, and semantic conventions. It is a versioned standards document maintained by the CNCF, not executable software.

Use cases

• implement an OpenTelemetry SDK for a new programming language
• check which signals and semantic conventions an OTel implementation must support
• understand how context propagation and baggage should work across services
• verify language SDK compliance against the spec compliance matrix
• propose or review changes to OpenTelemetry standards
• learn how traces, metrics, and logs are defined in OpenTelemetry

When to choose

• you are building or contributing to an OpenTelemetry SDK, instrumentation library, or collector component
• you need the authoritative definition of OTel behavior, signals, or semantic conventions
• you want to check a vendor's or language's compliance with the OpenTelemetry spec

When to avoid

• you want a runnable library or SDK to instrument your application - use a language-specific opentelemetry-* repo instead
• you need a deployable collector or backend - use opentelemetry-collector or an observability backend
• you want tutorials or getting-started docs - use opentelemetry.io/docs instead

Facets

learning-resource · maturity active

monitoring tracing logging developer-tools documentation monitoring cloud-computing microservices cross-platform cloud self-hosted specification opentelemetry observability telemetry distributed-tracing metrics semantic-conventions standards cncf devops

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification")