opentelemetry-principal-engineer

name	opentelemetry-principal-engineer
description	Principal/Senior-level OpenTelemetry playbook for traces, metrics, logs, semantic conventions, collector pipelines, sampling, data governance, and production observability architecture. Use when: instrumenting services, designing collector topologies, standardizing telemetry, debugging context propagation, or building large-scale observability platforms.

OpenTelemetry Mastery (Senior → Principal)

Operate

• Start from what must be explainable in production: request flow, failure attribution, dependency latency, and causality.
• Treat telemetry schemas, propagation, sampling, and collector design as platform architecture.
• Prefer standardized semantic conventions over one-off instrumentation creativity.
• Design for correlation across traces, metrics, and logs without uncontrolled cost.

Default Standards

• Context propagation must be reliable across service and async boundaries.
• Sampling policy should match debugging and business-critical workflows.
• Collector pipelines should be simple enough to operate and debug.
• Telemetry attributes are a cost and governance budget.
• Vendor portability should not mean lowest-common-denominator blindness.

References

• Tracing model and span design: references/tracing-model-and-span-design.md
• Context propagation and async boundaries: references/context-propagation-and-async-boundaries.md
• Semantic conventions and schema governance: references/semantic-conventions-and-schema-governance.md
• Sampling strategy and cost control: references/sampling-strategy-and-cost-control.md
• Collector architecture and pipelines: references/collector-architecture-and-pipelines.md
• Metrics, logs, and correlation: references/metrics-logs-and-correlation.md
• Reliability and operations: references/reliability-and-operations.md
• Incident runbooks: references/incident-runbooks.md