Comment by alisonatwork

I agree. The hardest work on OpenTelemetry (and OpenCensus/OpenTracing before it) was looking at all the different vendors and trying to come up with a common set of semantic conventions[0].

If your team is new to metrics or tracing - or even just structured logging - it's worth to start adding fields in the general structure of the otel semantic conventions, because then whichever third party service you eventually decide to push to, it won't take much of a shim to adapt your data to get there. And if you just stick with JSON logs pushed to ELK (or whatever) you at least build up a useful set of fields to query on.

[0] https://opentelemetry.io/docs/concepts/semantic-conventions/