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

(signoz.io)
144 points pranay01 | 2 comments | 27 Sep 25 18:56 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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CuriouslyC ◴[27 Sep 25 19:37 UTC] No.45398725[source]▶
A full observability stack is just a docker compose away: Otel + Phoenix + Clickhouse and off to the races. No excuse not to do it.
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pranay01 ◴[27 Sep 25 20:36 UTC] No.45399127[source]▶
one of the cases we have observed is that Phoenix doesn't completely stick to OTel conventions.

More specifically, one issue I observed is how it handles span kinds. If you send via OTel, the span Kinds are classified as unknown

e.g. The Phoneix screenshot here - https://signoz.io/blog/llm-observability-opentelemetry/#the-...

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1. ijk ◴[27 Sep 25 22:31 UTC] No.45399902[source]▶
Spans labeled as 'unknown' when I definitely labeled them in the code is probably the most annoying part of Phoenix right now.
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2. pranay01 ◴[27 Sep 25 23:58 UTC] No.45400428[source]▶
Yes, it is happening because OpenInference assumes these span kind values https://github.com/Arize-ai/openinference/blob/b827f3dd659fc...

Anything which doesn't fall in other span kinds is classified as `unknown`

For reference, these are span kinds which opentelemetry emits - https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-python/blob/...