Action Recommended: OpenTelemetry HTTP Attributes Breaking Changes

Earlier in 2023, OpenTelemetry initiated efforts to stabilize HTTP Semantic Conventions, culminating in their announcement of stability in November by merging existing conventions with the Elastic Common Schema HTTP attributes. This change is set to standardize data formats for widely-used OpenTelemetry instrumentation libraries, ensuring compatibility with systems utilizing the ECS HTTP schema and enabling stable releases. However, it introduces significant attribute changes, including renamings, removals, and new additions, affecting Java and .NET services that will default to these stable values from December 2023. Users of these services are advised to prepare for the transition, as the changes could impact triggers, SLOs, sampling rules, and queries. To mitigate potential disruptions, OpenTelemetry and Honeycomb provide guidance on auditing and updating configurations, introducing environment variables for managing attribute emission, and centralizing updates. Although the transition may pose challenges, OpenTelemetry plans to support a migration period with continued updates and communication to users about the evolving process.