OpenTelemetry is deprecating the Span Event API. This post explains why we’re making this change, what it means at a high level, and how you can prepare. In short:
We want to remove confusion and duplication caused by having two overlapping ways to emit events: span events and log-based events. New code should write events as logs that are correlated with the current span. The older “span events” style will be phased out over time, but existing data and views that show events on spans will keep working. Why deprecate the Span Event API? Today, OpenTelemetry offers two main ways to emit events that are correlated with traces:

OpenTelemetry's platform is an observability framework, offering insights into distributed tracing, metrics collection, and log management for cloud-native applications. Through documentation, tutorials, and community contributions, OpenTelemetry provides insights into instrumenting applications to monitor performance and troubleshoot issues. Developers and DevOps teams can learn about distributed tracing standards, telemetry data formats, and integration with observability tools to gain visibility into complex distributed systems.

OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry is deprecating the Span Event API (Span.AddEvent, Span.RecordException) in favor of log-based events emitted via the Logs API. The motivation is to eliminate duplication and confusion from having two overlapping ways to emit events correlated with traces. New code should use the Logs API for events; existing span event data remains valid and backends can still surface events on span views via a compatibility layer. The post outlines what changes, what stays the same, and provides role-specific guidance for operators, application developers, observability vendors, instrumentation authors, semantic convention authors, and OTel maintainers.

Deprecating Span Events API