open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification

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Specifications for OpenTelemetry

Stars: 4.3k
Forks: 1k
Open beginner issues: 4
Indexed issues: 325
Avg merge: 2d 7h
Merged PRs (30d): 25

Dominant language: Makefile
License: Apache-2.0
Last GitHub push: Sep 18, 2026
Latest indexed: Sep 19, 2026
Contributing guide: Contributing guide
Code of conduct: Code of conduct
Beginner labels: help wanted

Beginner friendly Everything

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325 open issues indexed

Clarify exemplar sampling for cardinality-overflow measurements Open

area:sdk maintainer-request spec:metrics

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 35/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5318 · Opened Sep 18, 2026
[MeterConfigurator] Clarify No-Op Meter behavior for dynamic configuration Open

spec:metrics

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 25/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5301 · 2 comments · 1 reaction · Opened Sep 4, 2026
Allow applications to assign names to SDK components Open

area:sdk maintainer-request spec:miscellaneous triage:deciding:community-feedback

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 35/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5298 · Opened Sep 4, 2026
Codify criteria for when an SDK and instrumentation is automatically injectable Open

triage:deciding:community-feedback

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 35/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5267 · Opened Aug 13, 2026
The ComposableAlwaysRecord sampler is missing Open

area:sampling sig-issue spec:trace

Difficulty 2/5 1-3 hours Newbie friendliness 68/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5266 · Opened Aug 13, 2026
Pull Request Dashboard Open

dashboard triage:accepted:ready

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 20/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5264 · Opened Aug 11, 2026
Why Exporter.ForceFlush and Exporter.Shutdown MUST be safe to be called concurrently? Open

area:sdk spec:logs triage:deciding:community-feedback

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 35/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5248 · 4 comments · Opened Aug 4, 2026
Consider classifying context-scoped attributes so providers can filter them Open

spec:context triage:deciding:community-feedback triage:followup

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 30/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5247 · 1 comment · Opened Aug 4, 2026
File exporter: should an existing file be appended to or truncated? Open

spec:protocol triage:deciding:community-feedback

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 35/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5243 · 1 comment · 1 reaction · Opened Jul 31, 2026
Add a skill for reviewing spec compliance Open

triage:deciding:community-feedback triage:followup

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 35/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5226 · 1 comment · 4 reactions · Opened Jul 21, 2026
Clarify Telemetry Policy update behaviour for sets of policies Open

spec:miscellaneous triage:deciding:community-feedback triage:followup

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 45/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5218 · 5 comments · Opened Jul 17, 2026
Clarify expected behavior for empty/whitespace-only span names Open

spec:trace triage:deciding:community-feedback

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 35/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5215 · Opened Jul 16, 2026
Fix issues related to `OTEL_ENTITIES` and maturity level Open

entities sig-issue spec:resource

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 35/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5209 · Opened Jul 14, 2026
Multiple issues could be closed Open

triage:accepted:ready

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5207 · 9 comments · 1 assignee · Opened Jul 14, 2026
Consider bi-directional context-scoped attribute propagation Open

spec:context triage:deciding:community-feedback

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 30/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5187 · 1 comment · 2 reactions · Opened Jul 1, 2026
Track Context-scoped attributes addition Open

spec:context triage:accepted:ready

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 25/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5185 · 1 comment · Opened Jun 30, 2026
BatchSpanProcessor / BatchLogRecordProcessor: add opt-in blocking mode when queue is full Open

area:sdk enhancement maintainer-request spec:logs triage:deciding:community-feedback triage:followup

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 35/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5178 · 2 comments · 1 reaction · Opened Jun 25, 2026
Prototype context scoped attributes Open

spec:context triage:accepted:needs-sponsor

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 35/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5170 · 2 comments · Opened Jun 22, 2026
Stabilize SpanProcessor#onEnding Open

spec:trace triage:deciding:community-feedback

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 25/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5156 · 6 comments · Opened Jun 16, 2026
Prometheus compatibility: do not duplicate equal values when colliding attribute keys are concatenated Open

sig-issue

Difficulty 2/5 1-3 hours Newbie friendliness 72/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5151 · Opened Jun 12, 2026
Deprecate TextMap Extract Keys Open

spec:context triage:deciding:needs-info triage:followup

Difficulty 4/5 3-5 days Newbie friendliness 48/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5150 · 7 comments · 3 reactions · Opened Jun 10, 2026
Consider cross-language guidelines for instrumentation library authors Open

maintainer-request triage:accepted:ready

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5148 · 4 comments · 5 reactions · 1 assignee · Opened Jun 10, 2026
Prometheus -> OTLP: Reconsider server resource attributes from scraped endpoints Open

sig-issue

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 35/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5146 · 2 comments · 1 reaction · Opened Jun 9, 2026
OTLP->Prometheus: Clarify what to do when `Service` Resource Attributes aren't present in the OTLP payload. Open

sig-issue spec:metrics

Difficulty 4/5 3-5 days Newbie friendliness 48/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5145 · 2 comments · Opened Jun 9, 2026
In-memory configuration model has more operation Open

spec:miscellaneous triage:deciding:community-feedback

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 45/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5122 · Opened May 31, 2026
Api definition for PluginComponentProvider Open

spec:miscellaneous triage:deciding:community-feedback triage:followup

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 35/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5121 · Opened May 31, 2026
Get all applicable instrumentation level settings Open

spec:miscellaneous triage:deciding:community-feedback

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 35/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5120 · Opened May 31, 2026
Declarative config guidance for per-component telemetry configuration Open

maintainer-request spec:miscellaneous triage:deciding:community-feedback

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 35/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5117 · 5 comments · 1 reaction · Opened May 26, 2026
Span flag to indicate metric exemplar references Open

spec:trace triage:deciding:community-feedback triage:followup

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 30/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5097 · 1 comment · 1 reaction · Opened May 15, 2026
Discovery of instrumentations for dynamic creation Open

spec:trace triage:deciding:community-feedback

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 35/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5079 · Opened May 10, 2026
[Logs] Clarify default values for optional parameters Open

spec:logs triage:deciding:community-feedback

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5075 · 1 comment · 1 assignee · Opened May 7, 2026
Support configuring SDK batch size in declarative config using `items` or `bytes` Open

spec:miscellaneous triage:deciding:community-feedback triage:followup

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 35/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5068 · 11 comments · Opened May 5, 2026
Define Resource Detector API Open

spec:resource triage:deciding:community-feedback triage:followup

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 35/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5066 · 3 comments · Opened May 4, 2026
Start defining what is & makes a distro Open

spec:miscellaneous triage:deciding:community-feedback

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 25/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5065 · Opened May 3, 2026
Share registered instrumentation Information with external clients Open

spec:miscellaneous triage:accepted:ready-with-sponsor

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5064 · 2 comments · 6 reactions · 1 assignee · Opened May 3, 2026
Publish specs at specs.opentelemetry.io, an exploratory proposal Open

triage:accepted:ready

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 25/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5049 · 8 comments · 7 reactions · Opened Apr 24, 2026
Stabilize "Environment Variables as Context Propagation Carriers" document Open

spec:context triage:accepted:ready

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5040 · 6 comments · 2 reactions · 1 assignee · Opened Apr 21, 2026
Add the "local id" vs. "universal id" details to the entity data model document Open

entities triage:accepted:ready-with-sponsor

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5038 · 1 assignee · Opened Apr 20, 2026
Define a Prometheus bridge Open

area:miscellaneous area:prometheus sig-issue spec:miscellaneous

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 35/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5030 · 3 comments · Opened Apr 16, 2026
Clarify client recovery semantics for oversized OTLP export requests Open

triage:deciding:community-feedback triage:followup

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 28/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5022 · 13 comments · Opened Apr 13, 2026
Entities: information from Dash0 on how we solved some merging issues with with our entities-like system Open

entities sig-issue spec:miscellaneous

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5021 · 1 assignee · Opened Apr 13, 2026
Add built-in event routing log processor Open

area:sdk enhancement spec:logs triage:deciding:community-feedback triage:followup

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 35/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5009 · 6 comments · Opened Apr 3, 2026
Add built-in support for otel.event.name attribute in Logs SDK Open

area:sdk enhancement spec:logs triage:deciding:community-feedback

Difficulty 3/5 1-2 days Newbie friendliness 58/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5008 · 4 comments · Opened Apr 3, 2026
Add `Span.SetErrorStatus` method Open

enhancement spec:trace triage:accepted:ready-with-sponsor

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5005 · 9 comments · 2 reactions · 1 assignee · Opened Apr 2, 2026
Add Span lifecycle operations to SpanProcessor Open

spec:trace triage:deciding:community-feedback

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 35/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#5002 · 4 comments · 3 reactions · Opened Mar 31, 2026
Visibility of in progress traces Open

spec:trace triage:deciding:community-feedback triage:followup

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 35/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#4993 · 9 comments · 3 reactions · Opened Mar 24, 2026
Stabilize Prometheus Metrics Exporter spec: Interaction with Translation Strategy Open

area:prometheus sig-issue spec:metrics

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#4992 · 1 comment · 1 assignee · Opened Mar 24, 2026
Stabilize Prometheus Metrics Exporter spec: Target Info configuration Open

area:prometheus sig-issue spec:metrics

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 35/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#4990 · 1 comment · Opened Mar 24, 2026
Stabilize Prometheus Metrics Exporter spec: Translation Strategy configuration Open

area:prometheus sig-issue spec:metrics

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#4988 · 1 comment · 1 assignee · Opened Mar 24, 2026
Stabilize Prometheus Metrics Exporter spec: Metric Conversion Open

area:prometheus sig-issue spec:metrics

Difficulty 5/5 Over a week Newbie friendliness 30/100

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#4979 · 2 comments · Opened Mar 24, 2026

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification

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