Standardise telemetry with OTel attribute naming, instrumentation scopes, resource attributes, span conventions, and OTLP protocol.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
What are OpenTelemetry semantic conventions and why do they matter?
Semantic conventions: without them, one library might emit http.method while another emits http_method. The conventions define the canonical name, type, and example values for common attributes. Backends like Jaeger, Grafana Tempo, and Datadog use these standard names for automatic service graph generation and pre-built dashboards.
2 / 5
What is an instrumentation scope in OpenTelemetry?
Instrumentation scope: when you call tracer = get_tracer("my-library", "1.2.0"), OTel tags all spans from that tracer with the scope name and version. This lets platform teams suppress noisy spans from a specific library version or route them to a different backend without affecting other instrumentation.
3 / 5
What is a resource attribute in OpenTelemetry and how does it differ from a span attribute?
Resource attributes: defined once at SDK initialisation, resource attributes travel with all spans, metrics, and logs from the process. service.name=checkout and k8s.node.name=node-42 allow backends to correlate telemetry across signals and filter by infrastructure dimension without tagging each individual span.
4 / 5
What naming pattern do OpenTelemetry span attribute names follow according to semantic conventions?
Attribute naming: the dot-separated lowercase format groups attributes by domain. http.* covers HTTP operations, db.* covers database calls, rpc.* covers remote procedure calls. The hierarchical structure makes it easy to select all database-related attributes with a prefix wildcard in query tools.
5 / 5
What is the purpose of the OTLP (OpenTelemetry Protocol) in the OTel ecosystem?
OTLP: before OTLP, each vendor (Datadog, Jaeger, Prometheus) required a different exporter library. OTLP is the native protocol for the OTel Collector and all major backends now accept it directly. Configure OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT and the same instrumented application can send telemetry to any compliant backend without code changes.