Carbon as a First-Class Signal: Designing a Standard for... - Diana Todea, VictoriaMetrics

Don't miss out! Join us at our next KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Salt Lake City, United States (Nov 9–12, 2026). Connect with our current graduated, incubating, and sandbox projects as the community gathers to further the education and advancement of cloud native computing. Learn more at https://kubecon.io Carbon as a First-Class Signal: Designing a Standard for OpenTelemetry - Diana Todea, VictoriaMetrics OpenTelemetry helps us measure latency, errors, and availability. But as sustainability moves into engineering, one question remains unanswered: how do we observe carbon? This talk explores Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) through the lens of OpenTelemetry semantic conventions. Rather than focusing on sustainability reporting, we examine the technical challenge of modeling carbon as telemetry: what entities should emissions be attributed to, which attributes should be standardized, and whether carbon belongs in metrics, traces, resource metadata, or all three. We will explore how carbon-related signals can be collected, enriched, and visualized alongside traditional observability data. Attendees will gain a deeper understanding of semantic conventions, telemetry design trade-offs, and the opportunities for OpenTelemetry to support a new generation of operational signals. The audience will leave with these take-aways: * Understanding SCI as an observability signal * Designing semantic conventions for carbon telemetry * Trade-offs between metrics, traces, and resource attributes * Practical implementation patterns using OpenTelemetry * Future directions for green observability