Resources

A resource represents the entity producing telemetry as resource attributes. For example, a process producing telemetry that is running in a container on Kubernetes has a process name, a pod name, a namespace, and possibly a deployment name. All four of these attributes can be included in the resource.

In your observability backend, you can use resource information to better investigate interesting behavior. For example, if your trace or metrics data indicate latency in your system, you can narrow it down to a specific container, pod, or Kubernetes deployment.

Resources should be assigned to a tracer provider at its initialization, and are created much like attributes:

resources := resource.NewWithAttributes(
    semconv.SchemaURL,
    semconv.ServiceNameKey.String("myService"),
    semconv.ServiceVersionKey.String("1.0.0"),
    semconv.ServiceInstanceIDKey.String("abcdef12345"),
)

provider := sdktrace.NewTracerProvider(
    ...
    sdktrace.WithResource(resources),
)

Note the use of the semconv package to provide conventional names for resource attributes. This helps ensure that consumers of telemetry produced with these semantic conventions can easily discover relevant attributes and understand their meaning.

Resources can also be detected automatically through resource.Detector implementations. These Detectors may discover information about the currently running process, the operating system it is running on, the cloud provider hosting that operating system instance, or any number of other resource attributes.

resources := resource.New(context.Background(),
    resource.WithFromEnv(), // pull attributes from OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES and OTEL_SERVICE_NAME environment variables
    resource.WithProcess(), // This option configures a set of Detectors that discover process information
    resource.WithOS(), // This option configures a set of Detectors that discover OS information
    resource.WithContainer(), // This option configures a set of Detectors that discover container information
    resource.WithHost(), // This option configures a set of Detectors that discover host information
    resource.WithDetectors(thirdparty.Detector{}), // Bring your own external Detector implementation
    resource.WithAttributes(attribute.String("foo", "bar")), // Or specify resource attributes directly
)