You'll noticeTier: how much it should matter to you
3Useful: my rating, 1 to 5
2Signal: worth watching, 1 to 5
TelemetryArea: what it touches
ImprovementsKind: in v2.1.300,
ImprovementsSection of the release
What
OpenTelemetry (OTel) is an open standard for sending traces, which are timed records of what a program did, to a monitoring tool of your choice. When you have it set up, Claude Code sends spans: one for each interaction, and one for each tool call (an action such as running a command or editing a file). Before, the interaction span carried only the prompt, its length and a sequence number. The interaction and tool spans now also carry these attributes:
gen_ai.conversation.id, identifying the conversation
gen_ai.provider.name, naming the model provider, for example aws.bedrock, gcp.vertex_ai or anthropic
The prompt text on the interaction span, which is tied to the OTEL_LOG_USER_PROMPTS environment variable, can now be redacted after the span has been recorded.
Why
These attribute names follow the OpenTelemetry conventions for generative AI, so tools that understand those conventions can group and label Claude Code traces without custom mapping. None of this appears unless you have configured OpenTelemetry yourself.
How sure we are
One source agreesOne thing we can check says the same as this entry.
Anthropic's release notes agreeAdded OpenTelemetry GenAI semantic-convention attributes to trace spans, such as gen_ai.provider.name, gen_ai.conversation.id…
