OpenTelemetry Skills for AI Coding Agents
Vendor-neutral skills that teach AI coding agents how to instrument applications with OpenTelemetry.
Covers SDK setup across languages, semantic conventions, Collector pipelines, and OTTL transformations.
Works with any OTLP-compatible backend.
Skills are packaged instructions and scripts that extend agent capabilities, following the Agent Skills format.
Maintained by Dash0.
[!TIP]
These skills have been improved using Tessl.
Try it out for your own agent skills, it's worth it.
Installation
Install with skills CLI (universal, works with any Agent Skills-compatible tool):
npx skills add https://github.com/dash0hq/agent-skills --all
# or a single skill:
npx skills add https://github.com/dash0hq/agent-skills --skill otel-semantic-conventions
For tool-specific installation instructions (Claude Code, Cursor, Tessl, and others), see INSTALL.md.
How to use
Once installed, skills load automatically and the agent picks them up when a task matches.
Examples:
Add OpenTelemetry instrumentation to my app
My traces are broken — spans show up as separate roots instead of a connected trace
Set up an OpenTelemetry Collector pipeline that forwards to Dash0
Write an OTTL expression to redact credit card numbers from log bodies
Ensure that my HTTP server spans have the correct attributes
Help me fix high-cardinality metrics that are blowing up my costs
Why vendor-neutral OpenTelemetry
These skills are built around the OpenTelemetry specification, not any single backend.
The output is standard OTLP telemetry that any OpenTelemetry-compatible backend can ingest.
Vendor lock-in in observability comes from proprietary agents and attribute schemas.
Skills in this repository avoid both: they guide agents to use OpenTelemetry SDKs and the OpenTelemetry Collector, and to follow the upstream Semantic Conventions for attribute, span, and metric naming.
Why semantic conventions matter
OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions define standardized names, types, and semantics for telemetry attributes, metric names, span names, and status codes.
Following them is the single highest-leverage thing you can do for observability quality.
When instrumentation follows semantic conventions:
- Auto-instrumentation libraries, dashboards, and alerting rules work out of the box.
- Service maps, operation grouping, and error tracking derive correct results without manual configuration.
- Cross-service queries return consistent results because every service speaks the same attribute language.
When conventions are missing or inconsistent, these capabilities degrade silently: no errors, just incomplete data, broken topology views, and fragmented queries.
Instrumentation score
Guidance in these skills aligns with the Instrumentation Score specification, a vendor-neutral corpus of guidance that quantifies how well a service follows OpenTelemetry best practices.
The spec defines impact-weighted rules across resources, spans, metrics, and logs.
Following this guidance helps your services score higher, which means better observability outcomes downstream.
Available skills
Expert guidance for implementing high-quality, cost-efficient OpenTelemetry telemetry.
Covers backend and browser instrumentation across multiple languages.
Use when:
- Setting up observability for a new service
- Adding traces, metrics, or logs to an application
- Debugging instrumentation issues
- Optimizing telemetry costs (cardinality, sampling)
- Connecting browser traces to backend traces
Rules covered:
- Telemetry (signal overview and correlation)
- Resources (service identity, environment, Kubernetes attributes)
- Metrics (instrument types, naming, units, cardinality)
- Logs (structured logging, severity, trace correlation)
- Node.js (auto-instrumentation, environment variables, Kubernetes)
- Go (SDK setup, instrumentation libraries, context propagation)
- Python (auto-instrumentation, Flask, Django, FastAPI)
- Java (javaagent, Spring Boot, JVM system properties)
- .NET (auto-instrumentation, ASP.NET Core, ActivitySource)
- Ruby (SDK setup, Rails, Sinatra)
- PHP (auto-instrumentation, Laravel, Symfony)
- Browser (OpenTelemetry JS, Dash0 SDK, server correlation)
- Next.js (App Router, full-stack instrumentation, common gotchas)
