Given the widespread adoption of OpenTelemetry HTTP semantic convention, and the extensive pre-stability breaking changes we are planning as part of ECS alignment, we are planning to provide a transition period to help give users and vendors time to adapt to these changes.

Here is an initial proposal from the HTTP semconv stability WG:

• Step 1: Propose spec PR to align HTTP and network semantic conventions with ECS
• Step 2 (in parallel with step 1): Prototype Java and Python instrumentation
  • Include a flag to emit the pre-ECS alignment semantic conventions
  • Not relying on schema translations since that doesn’t address attribute-based samplers, and also because of concerns raised around performance
• Step 3: Merge ECS alignment spec PR and mark HTTP semantic conventions as frozen
  • (call this spec version X)
• Step 4: Mark HTTP semconv stable after releasing instrumentation across 3 languages that conform to spec version X
• Step 5: For the first 6(?) months after spec version X is released, any instrumentation package published under the OTel org that emits HTTP semantic conventions for spec version X, must include a flag that can be enabled to emit spec version X-1
  • After that time, the flag can be dropped from the instrumentation packages