These documents define standard names and values of Resource attributes and Span attributes.
In OpenTelemetry spans can be created freely and it’s up to the implementor to annotate them with attributes specific to the represented operation. Spans represent specific operations in and between systems. Some of these operations represent calls that use well-known protocols like HTTP or database calls. Depending on the protocol and the type of operation, additional information is needed to represent and analyze a span correctly in monitoring systems. It is also important to unify how this attribution is made in different languages. This way, the operator will not need to learn specifics of a language and telemetry collected from multi-language micro-service can still be easily correlated and cross-analyzed.
The following semantic conventions for spans are defined: