alt Hacker News> There are practical limitations mostly with backend analysis tools
Not just end-of-line analysis tools, but also initiating SDKs, and system agents, and intermediate middle-boxes -- really anything that needs to parse OTel.
Spec > SDK > Trace > Span limits: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/trace/sdk/#span-lim...
Spec > Common > Attribute limits: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/common/#attribute-l...
I know the spec says the default AttributeValueLengthLimit = infinity, but...
> It’s quite common in LLM Observability to capture full prompts and LLM responses as attributes on spans, for example.
...I'd love to learn about any OTel-compatible pipeline/system that supports attribute values of arbitrary size! because I've personally not seen anything that lets you get bigger than O(1MB).
Well yeah, there are practical limits imposed by the fact that these have to run on real systems. But in practice, you find that you're limited by your backend observability system because it was designed for a world of many events with narrow data, not fewer events with wider data (so-called "wide events").
OTel and the standard toolkit you get with it doesn't prevent you from doing wide events.