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ALL-OBSE1001 · diagnostic_context

Judge whether telemetry carries useful and safe diagnostic context.

This is a contextual rule for all languages. Read its implementation.

Compare operational questions, event identity, outcome, correlation, dimensions, errors, cardinality, privacy, volume, and downstream search or aggregation needs. A call reaches this pass when it names a log level, a metric emitter, or a tracing operation, which is what a signal is spelled as in every language this reads.

Findings cite signal schemas, examples, operational questions, costs, and sensitive fields.

Hot paths may emit compact signals when correlation links to richer context elsewhere. A bare span is not a signal, because every parser, AST, and macro library answers span with the source range of a node, so a tracing span is recognized by the operation that starts or annotates one rather than by the word alone.

A failed request signal with operation, outcome, trace, and safe account class is actionable. Repeating full payloads on every step is noisy and unsafe.

  • Cites “OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions”
  • Cites “Observability Engineering”, context-rich debugging
  • Cites “Site Reliability Engineering”, monitoring distributed systems