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Merged
merged 63 commits into from
Jul 15, 2025
Merged

OTEP: Extending attributes to support complex values #4485

merged 63 commits into from
Jul 15, 2025

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@lmolkova lmolkova commented Apr 22, 2025 •
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Related to #4468, #4414

This OTEP suggests a path forward on how to support complex attributes. It proposes to:

  • allow complex attributes on all signals by default on the API and SDK level
  • discourage them on metrics, resources, instrumentation scope, and identifying attributes on entities. If complex attribute is provided, it's probably by mistake, but we let backend decide.
  • provide guidance in semconv to default to flat attributes whenever possible and develop conventions with an assumption that complex attributes are not indexed, not queryable and not efficient.
  • documents how limits can apply to complex attributes (leaf nodes are counted towards the attribute count limit and are truncated based on the value limit) and suggests other ways to protect from users misusing complex attributes.

Having experimental phase for complex attributes limits the impact of this change and gives backends a graceful period to update.

Liudmila Molkova and others added 4 commits April 20, 2025 12:33
pellared
pellared reviewed Apr 22, 2025
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Liudmila Molkova and others added 2 commits April 22, 2025 07:58
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@lmolkova lmolkova marked this pull request as ready for review April 22, 2025 22:45
@lmolkova lmolkova requested review from a team April 22, 2025 22:45
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In general, LGTM. There are still some things that would be good to have clarified.

@pellared pellared mentioned this pull request Apr 23, 2025
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trask
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Liudmila Molkova added 2 commits July 8, 2025 12:39
add pointer/ref as a future possibility, limit deep equailty requirem…
45a82c0 
…ents to implementations that allow using complex attrs on metrics, resources, entities, instr scope
toc
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@reyang reyang enabled auto-merge July 15, 2025 00:38
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@lmolkova lmolkova added this pull request to the merge queue Jul 15, 2025
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@lmolkova lmolkova deleted the complex-attributes branch July 15, 2025 17:14
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[IMPORTANT] Extending attribute value types is no longer a breaking c…
b71106a 
…hange (#4614)

Towards
#4602

Per OTEP:
https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/blob/main/oteps/4485-extending-attributes-to-support-complex-values.md#why-doesnt-this-require-a-major-version-bump

This basically reverts:
-
#3858

Before we did not have a consensus to extend the attribute value types.
However, this has changed with:
-
#4485

Related proto PR:
- open-telemetry/opentelemetry-proto#683

**As a follow-up I plan to create issues in all language repositories so
that they can prepare their APIs and SDKs to extend the attribute value
types.**

---------

Co-authored-by: Trask Stalnaker <[email protected]>
@pellared pellared mentioned this pull request Aug 29, 2025
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@jack-berg jack-berg mentioned this pull request Sep 17, 2025
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