Maintain Observability Surfaces

Companion Guidance

Use karpathy-guidelines alongside this skill for implementation or review work. Keep changes scoped, surface assumptions, and define focused validation before editing.

Use this skill when changing event fields, exporter behavior, subscriber config, or binding parity for ATIF or the full, gen_ai, and openinference OpenTelemetry projections.

Surfaces To Keep In Sync

• Core event model and emitted fields
• crates/core/src/observability/atif.rs
• crates/core/src/observability/otel.rs
• crates/core/src/observability/openinference.rs
• FFI and binding-native wrappers where the config or lifecycle is exposed
• Python, Go, and Node.js config objects and subscriber/exporter methods
• Observability config version 3, where one opentelemetry section contains

typed endpoints and OpenInference has no standalone public surface

• Docs under docs/about-nemo-relay/concepts/subscribers.mdx and

docs/configure-plugins/observability/

Design Checklist

• Is this an event-model change, exporter-config change, or lifecycle change?
• Do all bindings expose the same logical knobs and semantics?
• Does every OpenTelemetry endpoint require a type and nonblank destination?
• Does each endpoint resolve header_env values at activation and reject

missing, blank, or duplicate headers?

• Do layered ATOF sink, ATIF storage, and OpenTelemetry endpoint lists

concatenate with higher-precedence entries first?

• Are OpenTelemetry and OpenInference dependencies unconditional rather

than Cargo feature-gated?

• Does genai avoid nemorelay.*, project sanitized LLM instructions

and messages into the standard content attributes, and emit minimal spans for scopes without GenAI semantics so their parentage is preserved?

• Does enablefullpayloads preserve complete sanitized LLM request input

and annotations while leaving credential removal and sanitizers active?

• Does Relay derive compliant trace and span IDs consistently across typed

OpenTelemetry endpoints while preserving lifecycle parentage?

• Are mark events, start/end events, and orphan cases still handled correctly?
• Does a sanitized tool result annotation remain opaque under

categoryprofile.toolresultannotation, ATIF observation-result extra.toolresultannotation, and the single nemorelay.tool.result.annotation attribute in full and openinference, while gen_ai omits it?

• Do examples and docs use each exporter's documented flush/deregister

order before shutdown?

• Are span or trajectory fields still derived from the intended event data?

Validation

• Run the affected Rust crate tests plus just test-rust if event

fields changed.

• Run just test-python, just test-go, and just test-node when

binding-native config or lifecycle changed.

• Update docs and examples in the same branch.

References

• docs/about-nemo-relay/concepts/subscribers.mdx
• docs/configure-plugins/observability/about.mdx
• docs/configure-plugins/observability/opentelemetry.mdx
• crates/core/src/observability/atif.rs
• crates/core/src/observability/otel.rs
• crates/core/src/observability/openinference.rs
• validate-change