Building an OpenTelemetry Normalizer for GenAI Observability: Lessons from groundcover (Part 1)

Summary

This article shares lessons from groundcover engineers building a GenAI SDK, framework, and provider-agnostic AI observability solution using OpenTelemetry (OTel). It highlights the challenge that while many claim OTel support, few emit consistent attributes. The piece emphasizes groundcover's philosophy that observability data collection should be straightforward and unbounded, allowing SREs to focus on incident response and root cause analysis rather than instrumentation and data processing. It's the first part of a series on normalizing OTel for GenAI workloads.