Attribute Naming for attribute/scope in Logger regarding OTEL Specification

[jdevillard]

Hello,

I make a lot of search and didn't really find an answer on this topic.

The subject is the casing of the attributes when we log data and want to be able to use it correctly using OpenTelemetry and a backend tool.

If I look at the Otel specification, https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/semconv/general/attribute-naming/ , I can see the following :

Names SHOULD follow these rules:

- Names SHOULD be lowercase.

- Use namespacing to avoid name clashes. Delimit the namespaces using a dot character. For example service.version denotes the service version where service is the namespace and version is an attribute in that namespace.

- Namespaces can be nested. For example telemetry.sdk is a namespace inside top-level telemetry namespace and telemetry.sdk.name is an attribute inside telemetry.sdk namespace. Note: the fact that an entity is located within another entity is typically not a sufficient reason for forming nested namespaces. The purpose of a namespace is to avoid name clashes, not to indicate entity hierarchies. This purpose should primarily drive the decision about forming nested namespaces.

- For each multi-word dot-delimited component of the attribute name separate the words by underscores (i.e. use snake_case). For example http.response.status_code denotes the status code in the http namespace.

- Names SHOULD NOT coincide with namespaces. For example if service.instance.id is an attribute name then it is no longer valid to have an attribute named service.instance because service.instance is already a namespace. Because of this rule be careful when choosing names: every existing name prohibits existence of an equally named namespace in the future, and vice versa: any existing namespace prohibits existence of an equally named attribute key in the future

but when I take a look at the different sample in the DotNet documentation and Sample (https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-dotnet/blob/main/docs/logs/getting-started-console/README.md), i see this kind of example :

LogRecord.Attributes (Key:Value):
    name: artichoke
    price: 9.99
    OriginalFormat (a.k.a Body): Food `{name}` price changed to `{price}`.

(name and price a lowercase (1 word) but OriginalFormat that comes from the SDK if I'm not wrong is PascalCase )

LogRecord.Attributes (Key:Value):
    brandName: Contoso
    productDescription: Salads
    productType: Food & Beverages
    recallReasonDescription: due to a possible health risk from Listeria monocytogenes
    companyName: Contoso Fresh Vegetables, Inc.
    OriginalFormat (a.k.a Body): A `{productType}` recall notice was published for `{brandName} {productDescription}` produced by `{companyName}` ({recallReasonDescription}).

brandName, productDescription etc.. are camelCase

Should not be snake_case ?

I'm asking because in one of our application, we are setting Otel for Metrics and Logs, and some tag in Metrics are well set in lowercase and dot-namespaced but not in the Log. Because of this , in the back-end which could be case sensitive on attribute, we cannot filter and correlate log/metrics correctly.
So we would like to find the recommended way to do this.

Is the OTEL naming scheme the recommended way to use for logger state in .NET?

or do we need to use some logEnrichment or processor to get the correct naming?