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Contributing

Welcome to OpenTelemetry semantic conventions repository!

Before you start - see OpenTelemetry general contributing requirements and recommendations.

Table of Contents

Sign the CLA

Before you can contribute, you will need to sign the Contributor License Agreement.

How to Contribute

When contributing to semantic conventions, it's important to understand a few key, but non-obvious, aspects:

  • All attributes, metrics, etc. are formally defined in YAML files under the model/ directory.
  • All descriptions, normative language are defined in the docs/ directory.
  • All changes to existing attributes, metrics, etc. MUST be allowed as per our stability guarantees and defined in a schema file. As part of any contribution, you should include attribute changes defined in the schema-next.yaml file.
  • Links to the specification repository MUST point to a tag and not to the main branch. The tag version MUST match with the one defined in README.

Please make sure all Pull Requests are compliant with these rules!

Which semantic conventions belong in this repo

This repo contains semantic conventions supported by the OpenTelemetry ecosystem including, but not limited to, components hosted in OpenTelemetry.

Instrumentations hosted in OpenTelemetry SHOULD contribute their semantic conventions to this repo with the following exceptions:

Having all OTel conventions in this repo allows to reuse common attributes, enforce naming and compatibility policies, and helps to keep conventions consistent and backward compatible.

Want to define your own conventions outside this repo while building on OTel’s? Come help us decentralize semantic conventions.

Prerequisites

The Specification uses several tools to check things like style, spelling and link validity. Before contributing, make sure to have your environment configured:

  • Install the latest LTS release of Node. For example, using nvm under Linux run:

    nvm install --lts

  • Then from the root of the project, install the tooling packages:

    npm install

  • If on MacOs, ensure you have gsed (GNU Sed) installed. If you have HomeBrew installed, then you can run the following command to install GSED.

    brew bundle

1. Modify the YAML model

Refer to the Semantic Convention YAML Language to learn how to make changes to the YAML files.

Code structure

The YAML (model definition) and Markdown (documentation) files are organized in the following way:

├── docs
│   ├── attribute_registry
│   ├── {root-namespace}
│   │   ├── README.md
│   │   ├── ....md
├── model
│   ├── {root-namespace}
│   │   ├── events.yaml
│   │   ├── metrics.yaml
│   │   ├── registry.yaml
│   │   ├── resources.yaml
│   │   ├── spans.yaml

All attributes must be defined in the folder matching their root namespace under /model/{root-namespace}/registry.yaml file.

Corresponding markdown files are auto-generated (see Update the markdown files) in /docs/attribute_registry folder.

All semantic conventions definitions for telemetry signals should be placed under /model/{root-namespace} and should follow *{signal}.yaml pattern. For example, HTTP spans are defined in model/http/spans.yaml.

YAML definitions could be broken down into multiple files. For example, AWS spans are defined in /model/aws/lambda-spans.yaml and /model/aws/sdk-spans.yaml files.

Schema files

When making changes to existing semantic conventions (attributes, metrics, etc) you MUST also update the schema-next.yaml file with the changes.

For details, please read the schema specification.

You can also take examples from past changes inside the schemas folder.

Warning

DO NOT add your changes to files inside the schemas folder. Always add your changes to the schema-next.yaml file.

2. Update the markdown files

After updating the YAML file(s), you need to update the respective markdown files. For this, run the following commands:

make table-generation attribute-registry-generation

Hugo frontmatter

At the top of all Markdown files under the docs/ directory, you will see headers like the following:

<!--- Hugo front matter used to generate the website version of this page:
linkTitle: HTTP
path_base_for_github_subdir:
  from: content/en/docs/specs/semconv/http/_index.md
  to: http/README.md
--->

When creating new markdown files, you should provide the linkTitle attribute. This is used to generate the navigation bar on the website, and will be listed relative to the "parent" document.

3. Verify the changes before committing

Before sending a PR with your changes, make sure to run the automated checks:

make check

Alternatively, you can run each check individually. Refer to the Automation section for more details.

4. Changelog

When to add a Changelog Entry

Pull requests that contain user-facing changes will require a changelog entry. Keep in mind the following types of users (not limited to):

  1. Those who are consuming the data following these conventions (e.g., in alerts, dashboards, queries)
  2. Those who are using the conventions in instrumentations (e.g., library authors)
  3. Those who are using the conventions to derive heuristics, predictions and automatic analyses (e.g., observability products/back-ends)

If a changelog entry is not required (e.g. editorial or trivial changes), a maintainer or approver will add the Skip Changelog label to the pull request.

Examples

Changelog entry required:

  • Any modification to existing conventions with change in functionality/behavior
  • New semantic conventions
  • Changes on definitions, normative language (in /docs)

No changelog entry:

  • Typical documentation/editorial updates (e.g. grammar fixes, restructuring)
  • Changes in internal tooling (e.g. make file, GH actions, etc)
  • Refactorings with no meaningful change in functionality
  • Chores, such as enabling linters, updating dependencies

Adding a Changelog Entry

The CHANGELOG.md files in this repo is autogenerated from .yaml files in the /.chloggen directory.

Your pull request should add a new .yaml file to this directory. The name of your file can be arbitrary but must be unique since the last release.

During the release process, all ./.chloggen/*.yaml files are transcribed into CHANGELOG.md and then deleted.

  1. Create an entry file using make chlog-new. The command generates a new file, with its name based on the current branch (e.g. ./.chloggen/my-feature-xyz.yaml)
  2. Fill in all the fields in the generated file
  3. The value for the component field MUST match a folder name in the model directory (e.g. browser, http)
  4. Run make chlog-validate to ensure the new file is valid
  5. Commit and push the file

Alternately, copy ./.chloggen/TEMPLATE.yaml, or just create your file from scratch.

5. Getting your PR merged

A PR (pull request) is considered to be ready to merge when:

  • It has received at least two approvals from the code owners (if approvals are from only one company, they won't count)
  • There is no request changes from the code owners
  • There is no open discussions
  • It has been at least two working days since the last modification (except for the trivial updates, such like typo, cosmetic, rebase, etc.). This gives people reasonable time to review
  • Trivial changes (typos, cosmetic changes, CI improvements, etc.) don't have to wait for two days

Any maintainer can merge the PR once it is ready to merge.

Automation

Semantic Conventions provides a set of automated tools for general development.

Consistency Checks

The Specification has a number of tools it uses to check things like style, spelling and link validity.

You can perform all checks locally using this command:

make check

Note: make check can take a long time as it checks all links. You should use this prior to submitting a PR to ensure validity. However, you can run individual checks directly.

For more information on each check, see:

Auto formatting

Semantic conventions have some autogenerated components and additionally can do automatic style/spell correction. You can run all of this via:

make fix

You can also run these fixes individually.

See:

Markdown style

Markdown files should be properly formatted before a pull request is sent out. In this repository we follow the markdownlint rules with some customizations. See markdownlint or settings for details.

We highly encourage to use line breaks in markdown files at 80 characters wide. There are tools that can do it for you effectively. Please submit proposal to include your editor settings required to enable this behavior so the out of the box settings for this repository will be consistent.

To check for style violations, run:

make markdownlint

To fix style violations, follow the instruction with the Node version of markdownlint. If you are using Visual Studio Code, you can also use the fixAll command of the vscode markdownlint extension.

Misspell check

In addition, please make sure to clean up typos before you submit the change.

To check for typos, run the following command:

make misspell

NOTE: The misspell make target will also fetch and build the tool if necessary. You'll need Go to build the spellchecker.

To quickly fix typos, use

make misspell-correction

Markdown link check

To check the validity of links in all markdown files, run the following command:

make markdown-link-check

Version compatibility check

Semantic conventions are validated for backward compatibility with last released versions. Here's the full list of compatibility checks. Removing attributes, metrics, or enum members is not allowed, they should be deprecated instead. It applies to stable and experimental conventions and prevents semantic conventions auto-generated libraries from introducing breaking changes.

You can run backward compatibility check (along with other policies) in all yaml files with the following command:

make check-policies

Updating the referenced specification version

  1. Open the ./internal/tools/update_specification_version.sh script.
  2. Modify the PREVIOUS_SPECIFICATION_VERSION to be the same value as LATEST_SPECIFICATION_VERSION
  3. Modify LATEST_SPECIFICATION_VERSION to the latest specification tag, e.g. 1.21
  4. Run the script from the root directory, e.g. semantic-conventions$ ./internal/tools/update_specification_version.sh.
  5. Add all modified files to the change submit and submit a PR.

Making a Release

  • Ensure the referenced specification version is up to date. Use tooling to update the spec if needed.
  • Run opentelemetry.io workflow against semantic-conventions submodule as a smoke-test for docs. Fix broken links, if any.
  • Create a staging branch for the release.
    • Update schema-next.yaml file and move to schemas/{version}
      • Ensure the next version is appropriately configured as the {version}.
      • Copy schema-next.yaml to schemas/{version}.
      • Add next as a version in schema-next.yaml version.
    • Run make chlog-update VERSION=v{version}
      • make chlog-update will clean up all the current .yaml files inside the .chloggen folder automatically
      • Double check that CHANGELOG.md is updated with the proper v{version}
    • Send staging branch as PR for review.
  • After the release PR is merged, create a new release:
    • Set title and tag to v{version}
    • Set target to the commit of the merged release PR
    • Copy changelog to the release notes
    • Verify that the release looks like expected
    • Publish release

New release is then auto-discovered by opentelemetry.io pipelines which (via bot-generated PR) eventually results in new version of schema file being published.

Merging existing ECS conventions

The Elastic Common Schema (ECS) is being merged into OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions per OTEP 222. When adding a semantic convention that exists in some form in ECS, consider the following guidelines:

  • Prefer using the existing ECS name when possible. In particular:
    • If proposing a name that differs from the ECS convention, provide usage data, user issue reports, feature requests, examples of prior work on a different standard or comparable evidence about the alternatives.
    • When no suitable alternatives are provided, altering an ECS name solely for the purpose of complying with Name Pluralization guidelines MAY BE avoided.
  • Do not use an existing ECS name as a namespace. If the name must differ, use a different namespace name to avoid clashes or avoid using the namespace entirely. See the ECS field reference for existing namespaces.