OpenTelemetry Weaver

Observability by Design

Treat your telemetry like a public API

 

OpenTelemetry Weaver helps teams build observability by design, enabling consistent, type-safe, and automated telemetry through semantic conventions. With Weaver, you can define, validate, and evolve your telemetry schemas, ensuring reliability and clarity across your systems.

What is Observability by Design?

Have you ever experienced:

• Broken alerts after a deployment because metric names changed?
• Complex, hard-to-understand queries due to inconsistent naming?
• Teams struggling to interpret unclear or undocumented signals?
• Missing critical instrumentation discovered only in production?

Observability by Design solves these problems by treating your observability signals (metrics, traces, logs) as a first-class public API that requires the same quality standards as your code.

An introduction to Weaver and Observability by Design is presented in the official blog post: Observability by Design: Unlocking Consistency with OpenTelemetry Weaver

Install

Pre-built binaries:

Linux, Windows and Mac installers on the releases page.

Docker:

docker pull otel/weaver

From source:

git clone https://github.com/open-telemetry/weaver.git
cd weaver
cargo build --release

GitHub Actions

See opentelemetry-weaver-examples for general CI workflow examples. For live-check CI examples, see:

• opentelemetry-rust-contrib: tower instrumentation
• opentelemetry-rust-contrib: actix instrumentation
• otel-arrow: df-engine internal observability

Usage

Weaver provides a set of tools for working with schematized telemetry.

• Registry: The schema definition
  • Validation: Lint syntax, semantics and custom rules
  • Resolving: Consolidate the registry and its dependencies into a single artifact
  • Comparing: Compute the differences between two versions of a registry
• Code generation: Produce (non-)code artifacts from the schema using templates
  • e.g. Go code, Markdown documentation, etc.
• Working with real telemetry
  • Live-checking of emitted telemetry against a schema
  • Emitting example telemetry based on a schema

Further reading:

• Weaver Architecture: A document detailing the architecture of the project.
• Application Telemetry Schema OTEP: A vision and roadmap for the concept of Application Telemetry Schema.

Examples and How-Tos

• Weaver Examples - Official OTel project showcasing weaver use cases through runnable examples.
• O11y by design - from the CNCF 2025 presentation
• Define your own telemetry schema - A guide on how to define your own telemetry schema using semantic conventions.

Media

• OpenTelemetry Weaver - Observability by Design - CNCF presentation introducing Weaver's core concepts
• OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions and How to Avoid Broken Observability - SRECON Americas 2025 presentation
• Observability by Design: Unlocking Consistency with OpenTelemetry Weaver - official blog post on opentelemetry.io
• Presentation slides from the Semantic Convention SIG meeting on October 23, 2023.

Main Commands

Getting Help

• Documentation: docs/
• Issues: GitHub Issues
• Roadmap: Github Project
• Discussions: OpenTelemetry Slack #weaver

Contributing

We welcome contributions! See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

License

Apache License 2.0 - see LICENSE for details.

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Stop treating observability as an afterthought. Start building it by design.