Menu
OpenTelemetry Instrumentation Configuration Resource Attributes
Open source

Recommended OpenTelemetry Resource Attributes

OpenTelemetry resource attributes are added to log, span, and metrics emitted by your application.

These service resource attributes allow you to filter your metrics and traces effectively:

AttributeDescription
service.namespaceAn optional namespace for service.name
service.nameThe application name
deployment.environmentName of the deployment environment (staging or production)
service.instance.idThe unique instance, e.g. the pod name
service.versionThe application version, to see if a new version has introduced a bug

OpenTelemetry logs and metrics are stored in Loki and Prometheus respectively. Both Loki and Prometheus use job and instance labels according the OpenTelemetry compatibility specification with Prometheus and OpenMetrics:

LabelFilled with attribute (if it is found)
job${service.namespace}/${service.name} (if service.namespace is defined) or service.namespace
instanceservice.instance.id

Java Resource Providers

When using the Java Agent or Grafana OpenTelemetry Starter1, a set of global attributes, also known as resource attributes, is added to each span, metric, and log entry. The attributes are managed via Resource Providers which are detailed here. You can enable/disable select providers using the following properties or environment variable.

System Property /
Environment Variable		Description
otel.java.enabled.resource.providers /
OTEL_JAVA_ENABLED_RESOURCE_PROVIDERS		Enables one or more ResourceProvider types. If unset, all resource providers are enabled and all associated attributes are sent.
otel.java.disabled.resource.providers /
OTEL_JAVA_DISABLED_RESOURCE_PROVIDERS		Disables one or more ResourceProvider types.

As an example, if you don’t want to expose the name of the operating system through the resource, you can pass the following system property on the command line to disable the OsResourceProvider:

shell 
java -Dotel.java.disabled.resource.providers=io.opentelemetry.instrumentation.resources.OsResourceProvider -jar app.jar

Or if you only want to see process resources such as PID, you could export the following environment variable to enable only the ProcessResourceProvdier:

shell 
export OTEL_JAVA_ENABLED_RESOURCE_PROVIDERS=io.opentelemetry.instrumentation.resources.ProcessResourceProvider

You can set multiple resource providers by separating them with a comma (,).

  1. To use the disable/enable properties with grafana-opentelemetry-starter:1.0.0 you will need to include io.opentelemetry.instrumentation:opentelemetry-resources:<otelVersion>-alpha as a runtime dependency. With later versions, you can simply set/export the property/variable. ↩︎