2026-09-14

OTel GenAI semconvs applied

In Putting the trace before the loop, Dragos Bilaniuc applies the OpenTelemetry GenAI semantic conventions and shares lessons learned.

Adoption of standards

Dan Gomez Blanco has a great write-up on How Standards Get Adopted: OTel and Platform Engineering. Thank you!

Practitioner insights

When the Telemetry Finally Works: Six Months After Cutting Our Monitoring Bill by 95% by Nayan Rajani is an excellent source for lessons learned.

Adaptive tail sampling

Learn from Mike Goldsmith about the adaptive tail sampling processor in Bringing the Most Advanced Sampling to the OpenTelemetry Collector.

OTel and NixOS

The one and only Michele Mancioppi shared On running the OpenTelemetry Collector on NixOS and rejoicing in its declarative goodness. Good stuff :)

Ad-hoc query pipeline

Geertjan Wielenga describes an interesting pipeline for rich ad-hoc queries in From OpenTelemetry to DuckDB.

OTel and Kafka

If event-driven systems are part of your stack you will appreciate Distributed Tracing Across Kafka and gRPC With OpenTelemetry Context Propagation by martinuke0.

---

That was it for this edition of the o11y newsletter. Feel free to share news items with me via Bluesky DM. Stay safe and hope to see you around next week!