K8s Conventions SIG

June 3, 2026 · View on GitHub

Background and description

Kubernetes is the leading platform for Opentelemetry Collector deployment (80.6%) according to a recent survey. The OpenTelemetry community would like to stabilize k8s semantic conventions including k8s/container metrics in order to help the adoption of the respective OTel Collector receivers and processors. The goal of this SIG project is to work towards this direction.

Current challenges

At the moment there is no specific effort to align the Collector's implementation with the K8s Semantic Conventions and at the same time there is no big trust that the K8s Semantic Conventions can be considered as stable.

Goals, objectives, and requirements

The primary goal of this project is to focus on the defining a solid base in the K8s Semantic Conventions and work on adopting the Collector accordingly. Some of the issues that the group will be focusing are the following:

Deliverables

Introduce and stabilize k8s semantic conventions.
Update existing OpenTelemetry Collector components to conform with the stable conventions.

Staffing / Help Wanted

We are seeking domain experts to work on the introduction and stability of the K8s Semantic Conventions.

The goal is to follow @tedsuo's proposed Semantic Convention Process.

Stage 1: SIG Preparation
Stage 2: Stabilizing the Specification
Stage 3: Implementation

Timeline

Timeline Stage 1 (SIG Preparation) is happening now.

Stage 2 (Stabilizing the Specification) will begin as soon as we have adequate staffing for this project, and we coordinate weekly meeting times (currently targeting X).

Stage 3 (Implementation) will begin as soon as the k8s metrics and resource attributes are marked stable, and it should be relatively short we only need to update conformance to the specification for a few collector components.