Carbon as a First-Class Signal: Designing a Standard for OpenTelemetry

Sustainability & Carbon-Aware Series, Following our previous session "Is Your Kubernetes Cluster Carbon-Aware?", this is the next chapter: from carbon-aware scheduling to observing carbon as a telemetry signal.

OpenTelemetry measures latency, errors, and availability. But what about carbon? As sustainability becomes an engineering responsibility, one signal is still missing from our stacks.

This session tackles that question head-on, with technical depth, pragmatism, and no ESG fluff. Speaker : Diana Todea Head of DevRel Engineering @ VictoriaMetrics · CNCF Ambassador · TAG Lead, Operational Resilience · OTel Contributor · Co-lead, Neurodiversity @ CNCF Merge-Forward

Diana shapes open-source strategy, drives developer communities, and champions inclusive engineering cultures across the CNCF ecosystem. A rare combination of technical depth and community impact.

What We'll Cover:

Exploring Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) through the lens of OpenTelemetry semantic conventions:

• What entities should carbon emissions be attributed to?
• Which attributes should be standardized?
• Metrics, traces, or resource metadata, where does carbon belong?
• Practical implementation patterns for green observability

You'll leave with: a clear understanding of SCI as an observability signal, semantic convention design principles, and concrete next steps for your stack.

Organized under the CNCF Code of Conduct.

Register now ! spots are limited.