LLM Observability in the Wild – Why OpenTelemetry Should Be the Standard

The article makes a fair case for sticking with OTel, but it also feels a bit like forcing a general purpose tool into a domain where richer semantics might genuinely help. “Just add attributes” sounds neat until you’re debugging a multi-agent system with dynamic tool calls. Maybe hybrid or bridging standards are inevitable?

Curious if others here have actually tried scaling LLM observability in production like where does it hold up, and where does it collapse? Do you also feel the “open standards” narrative sometimes carries a bit of vendor bias along with it?

I think standard relational databases/schemas are underrated for when you need richness.

OTel or anything in that domain is fine when you have a distributed callgraph, which inference with tool calls does. I think the fallback layer if that doesn't work is just say Clickhouse.

Note, you can store otel data in clickhouse and augment the schema as needed, and get the best of both worlds. That's what we do and it works great.