OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions and How to Avoid Broken Observability

This conference talk from SREcon25 Americas explores the critical role of OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions in standardizing telemetry data and preventing observability failures. Learn how these conventions create consistency in span names, metric instruments, attribute types, and values across codebases, libraries, and platforms. Discover the challenges Datadog faced when changes to HTTP and Deployment Semantic Conventions disrupted client systems, and understand how they collaborated with the community to develop the Schema Processor solution that prevents painful outages during convention updates. The presentation by Dinesh Gurumurthy from Datadog Inc. and Laurent Querel from F5 provides valuable insights for SRE professionals looking to implement robust observability practices using OpenTelemetry standards.