Does pedestal need anything beyond the otel api / semantic convention jars?

Technically, it just needs the API jars, and the implementations will be no-ops unless you configure things.

There's such a wide array of possibilities for configuring otel starting with whether you use the Java agent or not.

So I think this will mostly be Pedestal documentation and pointers to the otel docs.

With the old stuff, Dropwizard, you got metrics that were accessible via JMX by default, and only needed to configure things if you were publishing out.

Yep makes sense. It’s been the same process of discovery for us haha. Otel definitely feels complicated but is pretty slick once it’s working.