A semantic convention standardizes names and meanings for telemetry metadata, making signals easier to correlate. OpenTelemetry establishes these semantics up front rather than relying only on later relabeling. section 11.1 section 11.6
OpenTelemetry applies semantic conventions to several metadata classes:
- Resource attributes identify the entity producing telemetry, such as a Kubernetes node, cluster, region, container, or pod. section 11.1.1
- Signal attributes describe particular telemetry types, including HTTP and RPC spans, system and application metrics, log media, and event context. section 11.1.1
- Consistent metadata lets backends connect traces, metrics, and logs, although support differs across correlation paths. section 11.1.1 section 11.6
A service in an EKS cluster
Suppose svc-wow runs in namespace boom on an EKS cluster named prod-42 in eu-west-1 and exposes HTTP metrics. Treating its pod as the signal source allows resource attributes to identify the surrounding cloud, cluster, and workload, while HTTP metric conventions describe the emitted signal. section 11.1.1
Table 11.1 Overview of signal correlations (view table figure)
Use the signal-correlation table to browse supported transitions among traces, metrics, and logs. section 11.1.1
