Dinesh Gurumurthy, Datadog Inc., and Laurent Querel, F5
The OpenTelemetry community has introduced Semantic Conventions - a defined schema that brings consistent meaning to telemetry data, defining everything from span names and metric instruments to attribute types and valid values. Semantic Conventions standardize naming across your codebase, libraries, and platforms, ensuring smooth data flow and better insights. With these benefits come drawbacks - namely that Semantic Conventions can and will change. Join us to learn how Datadog was impacted when changes to HTTP and Deployment Semantic Conventions caused disruptions for our clients. To fix these problems, Datadog came together with the community to develop the Schema Processor - a solution built to handle these changes without painful outages.
Dinesh Gurumurthy is a Staff Engineer at Datadog and the founding leader of the company’s OpenTelemetry team. Last year, Dinesh led the initiative to embed the OpenTelemetry collector with the Datadog Agent. He is also highly involved in the OpenTelemetry community, contributing to multiple projects. Before joining Datadog, Dinesh worked at a few startups, notably FuboTV.
Laurent Querel is a Senior Director and Distinguished Engineer at F5, focusing on observability and data processing. He is an enthusiastic supporter of open source and currently co-maintains two projects within the OpenTelemetry community: OTEL Weaver, a tool for managing and controlling semantic convention registries, and OTEL Arrow, an alternative protocol to OTLP that can improve compression rates by 30% to 70%.
author = {Dinesh Gurumurthy and Laurent Querel},
title = {{OpenTelemetry} Semantic Conventions and How to Avoid Broken Observability},
year = {2025},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}