Blog

Meet the Author

Mike Goldsmith

Staff Software Engineer

Mike is an engineer with a lot of experience working on open source projects, including contributing to OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry. Mike lives in Durham, UK with his wife and family (two kids, two cats and dog) and enjoys watching sports and playing guitar.

September 1, 2026

Bringing the Most Advanced Sampling to the OpenTelemetry Collector

Honeycomb is donating its adaptive tail sampling processor, built on years of Refinery experience, to the OpenTelemetry Collector. See how adaptive sampling, trace fingerprinting, and sample rate attribution work, and how to try it today with the Honeycomb Collector Distribution.

Making Semantic Conventions Work for You With OpenTelemetry Weaver

In this post, I'll show how OpenTelemetry Weaver lets you define, layer, and validate semantic convention schemas so that both humans and agents have full context on every attribute in your telemetry.

Taming Log Noise With the OpenTelemetry Collector's Drain Processor

Do you receive 50 million log lines per day and struggle to see what actually matters? Health checks, heartbeat pings, connection pool messages—they all drown out the errors and anomalies you're trying to find. What if the Collector could figure out the patterns for you?

Managing OpenTelemetry Semantic Convention Migrations With the Collector

This is what a semantic convention migration looks like in practice: not a clean cutover, but months of coexistence where old and new attribute names overlap. In this post, I'll explain why this happens, how the OpenTelemetry Collector's schema processor is designed to automate migrations in both directions, and what we're actively working on to get it into a state where everyone can use it.

Instrumentation

Technical Deep Dives

OpenTelemetry