Observability Summit North America 2026

OpenTelemetry’s GenAI semantic conventions are evolving quickly. Version 1.37 marked a major shift in how LLM behavior is expressed using standard spans and attributes. While later releases refined and clarified the spec, real-world adoption remains uneven, and “GenAI-compatible” can mean very different things across the ecosystem.

In this talk, I’ll share hands-on lessons from implementing and validating GenAI support in real emitters, including close collaboration with Strands. Implementing the 1.37 spec on both sides surfaced semantic ambiguities that only became clear in practice and ultimately led to stronger implementations.

I’ll also outline the current GenAI instrumentation landscape: Strands emitting 1.37+ compliant spans; OpenLLMetry, which mixes newer conventions with legacy and custom attributes; and OpenInference, which claims OpenTelemetry compatibility but does not emit GenAI semantic convention attributes.

Finally, I’ll show how these gaps surface in practice—teams believing they emit 1.37-compliant telemetry but sending pre-1.37 or non-spec data—and briefly touch on transition guidance like OTEL_SEMCONV_STABILITY_OPT_IN.