A telemetry system is only as good as the data it emits. OpenTelemetry provides APIs for recording traces, metrics, and logs. Currently, only the tracing API is stable. The metrics API is expected to be stable at the end of 2021, followed by the logging API in Q1 of 2022.

For every type of common software component (HTTP, gRPC, SQL, Kafka, etc), OpenTelemetry also provides definitions for the specific keys and values which must be recorded. This ensures that the data OpenTelemetry produces is as useful as possible, and is consistent across languages and libraries. These definitions are called semantic conventions.

Today, these semantic conventions are incomplete. They must be reviewed by subject matter experts to ensure that the emitted data is high quality and correct, and the configuration options provide sufficient customization for real world usage. Until this happens, the semantic conventions are marked as experimental.

Once these conventions are stable, instrumentation must be written for every major open source framework and library. OpenTelemetry will not be fully mature until this instrumentation exists and becomes stable.

In this workgroup, we'd like to focus on defining semantic conventions for instrumentation.

The proposed time for this workgroup is: Mondays at 1130 AM - Noon Pacific Time.

For more details on Instrumentation semantic conventions work done so far, please see https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gAD5wqqf74XNLtTL6CbB7kHfooh9kovbFI8pQhhYrzE/edit#

For general Instrumentation discussions so far, please see: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YNRCg9fdjJgZRs56vvf7rfFPk06mhp781sWHYypOaAk/edit#heading=h.f7ta67ofb8f

For reference please see request for Instrumentation SIG at #802

cc: @pyohannes @productml-ai @jsuereth @tedsuo