Comment by phillipcarter
Comment by phillipcarter 3 days ago
There are practical limitations mostly with backend analysis tools. OTel does not define a limit on how large a span is. It’s quite common in LLM Observability to capture full prompts and LLM responses as attributes on spans, for example.
> There are practical limitations mostly with backend analysis tools
Not just end-of-line analysis tools, but also initiating SDKs, and system agents, and intermediate middle-boxes -- really anything that needs to parse OTel.
Spec > SDK > Trace > Span limits: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/trace/sdk/#span-lim...
Spec > Common > Attribute limits: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/common/#attribute-l...
I know the spec says the default AttributeValueLengthLimit = infinity, but...
> It’s quite common in LLM Observability to capture full prompts and LLM responses as attributes on spans, for example.
...I'd love to learn about any OTel-compatible pipeline/system that supports attribute values of arbitrary size! because I've personally not seen anything that lets you get bigger than O(1MB).