ECS & OpenTelemetry

In April 2023, Elastic donated ECS to OpenTelemetry and together with the OTel community jointly announced the intention to achieve convergence of ECS and OTel Semantic Conventions (SemConv). This donation should be seen as a directional decision for the evolution of both standards rather than a single event that merged both schemas into a single standard.

While both schemes complement each other in large areas and thus offer mutual added value and great potential for convergence, it is important to understand that in some areas convergence is not achievable due to conceptual differences or consistency reasons. For example, while ECS contains a few fields (e.g. container.disk.read.bytes) that are meant to be used in a metric-like way, metrics in OpenTelemetry are following a completely different data model (with metric name, type, dimensions, etc.). Also, in OTel semantic conventions there are some stable (or quasi-stable) attributes that have semantically equivalent, stable fields in ECS, however, with different field names. This kind of differences require explicit handling to achieve compatibility.

The ECS schema files contain an explicit mapping between ECS fields and corresponding OTel semnatic convention attributes. This can be used to generate tooling for compatibility between ECS and semnatic conventions (e.g. alias fields in Elasticsearch). The relation between individual ECS fields and corresponding OTel semantic conventions attributes follows one of the following categories:

The following documentation pages provide an overview and more details on the alignment between ECS and OTel semantic conventions: