OpenTelemetry

A trace arrives with a service name and nothing else. Working out which team to wake up means someone opening a wiki — at exactly the moment nobody has time to.

teamapi generate otel /path/to/your/org --out ./otel

otel/checkout-api.env
otel/ledger.env
otel/onboarding-api.env
otel/payments-api.env
otel/collector.yaml

The attributes#

attribute	from
`service.name`	the service
`service.namespace`	the owning team's id
`teamapi.team`	team id
`teamapi.team_name`	the team's display name
`teamapi.topology`	stream-aligned, platform, complicated-subsystem, enabling
`teamapi.channel`	the team's Slack channel — where an alert should go
`teamapi.repository`	the service's repository

service.name and service.namespace are the semantic-convention names. Everything else sits under a teamapi. prefix on purpose: OpenTelemetry has no standard attribute for which team owns this, and squatting in the reserved namespace is how you collide with a future spec revision.

Two ways to apply it, because two different people own the levers#

Per service — checkout-api.env holds one line an SDK reads directly:

OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES=service.name=checkout-api,service.namespace=stream-checkout,teamapi.team=stream-checkout,teamapi.team_name=Stream%20Checkout,…

Needs every service's deployment touched, but works with no collector changes.

Centrally — collector.yaml is a transform processor that stamps the same attributes based on service.name:

processors:
  transform/teamapi:
    error_mode: ignore
    trace_statements:
      - context: resource
        statements:
          - set(attributes["service.namespace"], "stream-checkout") where attributes["service.name"] == "checkout-api"

One config, no deployments touched — if you're the one who owns the collector.

Two details that matter#

Values are percent-encoded. OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES is W3C Baggage: comma-separated key=value. A team name or focus containing a comma would silently truncate the list, dropping every attribute after it. Encoding is not cosmetic here — it's the difference between working and appearing to work.

One OTTL statement per attribute. The grammar is a single editor with an optional where, so set(...) set(...) on one line does not parse. The generated config is longer than it looks like it needs to be for exactly that reason.

Suggested loop#

teamapi generate otel on merge.
Apply the collector config, or roll the env files into your deployment templates.
Facet dashboards and alert routing on teamapi.team, and send the page to teamapi.channel.