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Clarify usage of "otel." attribute namespace (#1640)
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I noticed developers adding their own attributes to this namespace
without going through the specification. We need to regulate this
namespace through the specification, just like we do it for other
semantic conventions.
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tigrannajaryan authored and jsuereth committed Nov 16, 2023
1 parent 7a3f37d commit 71df386
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14 changes: 14 additions & 0 deletions specification/common/attribute-and-label-naming.md
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Expand Up @@ -130,3 +130,17 @@ It is recommended to limit names to printable Basic Latin characters
(more precisely to
[U+0021 .. U+007E](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Latin_(Unicode_block)#Table_of_characters)
subset of Unicode code points).

## otel.* Namespace

Attribute and label names that start with `otel.` are reserved to be defined by
OpenTelemetry specification. These are typically used to express OpenTelemetry
concepts in formats that don't have a corresponding concept.

For example, the `otel.library.name` attribute is used to record the
instrumentation library name, which is an OpenTelemetry concept that is natively
represented in OTLP, but does not have an equivalent in other telemetry formats
and protocols.

Any additions to the `otel.*` namespace MUST be approved as part of
OpenTelemetry specification.

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