o11y IM OTEL/conf - Adding custom dimension/property

Applicability

Description

OTEL collector has several options to add metadata to data points it ingests into o11y Cloud.  This is done via attribute processors to add additional context that can also be added conditionally.

Resolution

Change metadata via
attributes processor,
resource processor
metrics transform processor

Use the resource attribute option to fix it.

Example configuration would look like this:

processors:
   resource/add_dimension:
     attributes:
     - action: insert
     value: dimension.value
     key: dimension.name

Add this processor afterwards to the service pipeline for metrics:

service:
   pipelines:
      metrics:
         receivers: [hostmetrics, otlp, signalfx, smartagent/signalfx-forwarder]
         processors: [memory_limiter, batch, resourcedetection, resource/add_dimension]
         exporters: [signalfx]

After restarting the OpenTelemetry collector, new time series with the new dimension created will be seen.

An alternative option is to use our "/v2/dimension" API ( apibasics api_list ) to add a custom property to a dimension that is emitted from the host, such as "host", and this property will traverse all timeseries that has that dimension. You can filter and aggregate data just like you would by adding a dimension and still retain the data previously emitted by the host for easy viewing.