Configure OpenTelemetry resource detection processors in the Collector to automatically populate cloud and Kubernetes resource attributes
domain: opentelemetry.io · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Add the resourcedetection processor to the processors block and list detectors such as env, system, gcp, aws, azure, or k8snode
Set override: true to allow detected attributes to replace manually set resource attributes from upstream SDK instrumentation
Mount the Kubernetes downward API environment variables into the Collector pod so the k8snode detector can read node metadata
Grant the Collector service account RBAC permissions to read Node objects if using the k8snode detector via the API rather than env vars
Chain the resourcedetection processor before the batch processor in all pipelines so enriched attributes are present before batching
Known gotchas
Cloud provider detectors make HTTP calls to instance metadata services at startup; in environments where those services are unavailable the Collector startup is delayed by detector timeouts
The k8sattributes processor and resourcedetection processor serve different purposes; k8sattributes enriches spans with pod labels while resourcedetection sets resource-level attributes
Enabling too many detectors increases startup time; disable detectors not relevant to the deployment environment to reduce initialization latency
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