Elastic and Other Security Leaders Working to Make OTel Semantic Conventions a Standard Across Observability and Security Data

Elastic® recently contributed the Elastic Common Schema (ECS) to the OpenTelemetry (OTel) project, enabling a unified data specification for security and observability data within the OTel Semantic Conventions framework. We are committed to developing these open standards jointly. And today, we share that several more community-minded security technology vendors are contributing to this effort. Embracing the OTel Semantic Conventions framework helps users reduce the time and effort required for querying and correlating diverse data, building visualizations, and analyzing features for machine learning applications. Normalizing security and observability data with the OTel Semantic Conventions is a powerful tool that drastically reduces the complexity that so often hinders efficient analysis of software, performance, and security issues.

Security teams and technology vendors alike are embracing open data standards to enable holistic analysis of diverse data. In fact, OTel is the second-highest velocity project in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) because of its vendor agnostic framework.

Partners and vendor reactions

Since the initial launch, we now have more security vendors and partners contributing to and relying on the new OTel Semantic Conventions. Here are a few of their stories:

Cribl

“It's no surprise that OpenTelemetry's popularity is continuing to surge. OTel prevents customers from being locked into specific, proprietary data formats, giving them greater control and flexibility,” said Nick Heudecker, Senior Director of Market Strategy and Competitive Intelligence at Cribl. “As a company purposefully designed to be vendor-agnostic and help customers send and receive data from any source, we see immense value in the new OTel Semantic Conventions and look forward to continuing to partner with Elastic to drive greater interoperability across enterprise IT and security.”

Mimecast

“Mimecast aims to deliver top cybersecurity solutions for our customers. We embrace open source standards and schemas as it helps us reduce complexity and challenges for 40,000+ customers around the world,” said Jules Martin, Vice President of Technology Alliances at Mimecast. “By partnering with Elastic and OTel Semantic Conventions, Mimecast customers will be able to leverage standard instrumentation libraries, tools and consumption experiences.”

Tines

“With our no-code philosophy, open source conventions like OTel Semantic Conventions are ideal for Tines and our customers,” said Eoin Hinchy, Founder at Tines. “Tines and Elastic know that these shared standards are vital for improving analyst productivity and modernizing security operations.”

ECS

“Open source standards that unify data across types and sources make a positive impact in helping customers scale and be more agile,” said Mike Zakrzewski, Senior Director of Cyber Technologies at ECS. “When we see ECS public sector and commercial customers adopting such standards they are able to simplify integrations, unify and automate data analytics providing faster time to insights, and adjust service offerings much faster than without these open source standards.”

Join the movement

An open approach to security benefits us all — when we’re receptive to outside contributions, large-scale testing, and real-world feedback from the broader community, we create stronger technology.

Find out more and determine how you can be more efficient with open security tools.