Cloud Native Observability Standard

An open source observability framework for cloud-native software that provides a unified set of APIs, libraries, agents, and collector services to capture distributed traces, metrics, and logs from applications. The project is hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and builds upon years of experience from the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects, combining best practices from the community into a single vendor-neutral standard. Instrumentation is written once using standardized APIs and SDKs, then exported to any observability backend including Jaeger, Prometheus, commercial vendors, or custom solutions, allowing teams to switch backends without modifying application code. The three pillars of observability are unified through shared context that flows through entire request paths, correlating traces with metrics and logs to provide a complete picture of application behavior across all components and services. The specification defines language-specific APIs and SDKs for Java, Python, JavaScript, Go, .NET, Rust, PHP, Ruby, C++, Swift, and Erlang, ensuring consistent semantic conventions across polyglot microservice architectures. The Collector is a vendor-agnostic proxy that receives telemetry data, processes it through configurable pipelines for filtering, batching, attribute enrichment, and routing, then exports to multiple backends simultaneously. Auto-instrumentation libraries provide zero-code telemetry for popular web frameworks, database drivers, and HTTP clients in each supported language, automatically capturing spans for incoming and outgoing requests. The ecosystem includes a demo application showcasing realistic microservice instrumentation, community-maintained components for Kubernetes, cloud providers, and message queues, and certification programs for compliant vendor implementations.