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Last updated: March 27, 2026

Semantic Convention Upgrades

Learn how Dash0's OpenTelemetry schema migrations automatically update attribute names and locations to align with evolving semantic conventions, for consistent telemetry data without code changes.

Overview

OpenTelemetry semantic conventions evolve over time to improve clarity, consistency, and completeness in telemetry data. These changes can include renaming attributes, moving attributes across levels, or updating metric names. Dash0 provides automatic schema migration capabilities that transform your telemetry data during ingestion to align with the OpenTelemetry semantic conventions version of your choice, for consistency across your observability data without requiring changes to your instrumentation code.

Understanding Schema Migrations

Schema migrations in Dash0 automatically handle the evolution of OpenTelemetry semantic conventions. Common migrations include:

  • Attribute Renaming: Updating attribute names to align with the latest conventions (e.g., http.status_code to http.response.status_code).
  • Attribute Relocation: Moving attributes to their proper level (e.g., moving service.name from span attributes to resource attributes).
  • Metric Name Standardization: Updating metric names to follow the current conventions.
  • Type Conversions: Converting attribute values to comply with specification requirements.

Schema migrations operate at ingestion time without requiring changes to your instrumentation code, making it easy to maintain consistency even with diverse telemetry sources.

Configuration Options

Schema migrations in Dash0 are configured at the dataset level, allowing you to apply different migration strategies to different environments. The available options include:

  • Latest: Always apply migrations to the most current version of OpenTelemetry semantic conventions.
  • Specific Version: Select a stable semantic convention version (e.g., 1.20.0, 1.19.0) to ensure consistency even as new versions are released.
  • Disabled: Do not apply any schema migrations (raw telemetry is preserved).

How Schema Migrations Work

When telemetry data is received, Dash0 examines the data and applies the appropriate transformations based on your configuration. This happens transparently before the data is indexed and stored, so that queries, dashboards, and alerts operate on consistent data.

Here's an example of how a schema migration works for an HTTP access log with the legacy http.status_code attribute and a wrongly positioned service.name attribute. The example uses OpenTelemetry's OTLP data format.

Before migration:

yaml
12345678910111213141516171819202122232425
resourceLogs:
  - resource:
      attributes:
        - key: k8s.pod.name
          value:
            stringValue: opentelemetry-demo-productcatalogservice-54596f6bd8-rbd57
        - key: k8s.pod.uid
          value:
            stringValue: 96fbbe11-9bdf-48c6-a0c8-c5b972df540c
    scopeLogs:
      - logRecords:
          - attributes:
              - key: service.name
                value:
                  stringValue: productcatalogservice
              - key: http.status_code
                value:
                  intValue: "404"
            body:
              stringValue: "GET /products/81jkfa89obkda"
            severityNumber: 9
            severityText: "INFO"
            spanId: L/fKDoHFkzg=
            traceId: NatRZh4+DXVfO+rpANjCgw==
            timeUnixNano: "1747637717357189408"

After migration:

yaml
12345678910111213141516171819202122232425
resourceLogs:
  - resource:
      attributes:
        - key: k8s.pod.name
          value:
            stringValue: opentelemetry-demo-productcatalogservice-54596f6bd8-rbd57
        - key: k8s.pod.uid
          value:
            stringValue: 96fbbe11-9bdf-48c6-a0c8-c5b972df540c
        - key: service.name
          value:
            stringValue: productcatalogservice
    scopeLogs:
      - logRecords:
          - attributes:
              - key: http.response.status_code
                value:
                  intValue: "404"
            body:
              stringValue: "GET /products/81jkfa89obkda"
            severityNumber: 9
            severityText: "INFO"
            spanId: L/fKDoHFkzg=
            traceId: NatRZh4+DXVfO+rpANjCgw==
            timeUnixNano: "1747637717357189408"

In this example, two migrations are applied:

  1. The http.status_code attribute is renamed to http.response.status_code.
  2. The service.name attribute is moved from log record attributes to resource attributes.

The data now has a chance to be consistent across services.

Note: Dash0 typically further enriches log records like these through the application of Log AI.