Kubernetes attributes promoted to release candidate in OTel Semantic Conventions
Over the past few months, the K8s (Kubernetes) Semantic Conventions SIG focused
on stabilizing Kubernetes attributes used by OpenTelemetry Collector processors
such as k8sattributes and resourcedetection. That work has now paid off:
Kubernetes attributes have been promoted to release candidate status. Users can
try this new schema via feature gates and provide feedback before the final
stable release. Read on to discover how we reached this milestone and what’s on
the horizon.
Prior art
Last October, the K8s (Kubernetes) Semantic Conventions SIG
completed
the first target of the group’s goals: to define as Semantic Conventions the
K8s-related metrics that the OpenTelemetry Collector already had in place, i.e.,
k8s.pod.cpu.time, etc.
KubeCon NA 2025
During last KubeCon NA in November 2025, the group met in person and discussed
the SIG’s next plans. The proposal was to focus on K8s attributes’ stability and
leave metrics as a secondary priority. The main reason for this was to work in
alignment with the recently set
Collector SIG’s goals,
one of which was to stabilize the k8sattributes processor component, a
component that heavily relies on the K8s attributes Semantic Conventions. In
this context, having stable K8s attributes as Semantic Conventions would greatly
benefit the k8sattributes processor’s stability progress.
Alignment with Collector SIG
From this discussion, we made a decision and drafted up a plan for the following months. The plan was indeed to focus on attributes’ stability in alignment with the Collector’s SIG priorities and after that to focus K8s metrics’ stability accordingly.
Recent accomplishments
Consequently, for the past few months, the group has focused on the stability of
the K8s attributes Semantic Conventions, specifically those already used by the
OpenTelemetry Collector Contrib components that are targeting stability (i.e.,
k8sattributes processor, resourcedetection processor, etc.). The respective
issue
(issue 3120)
tracks this work, and the K8s SemConv SIG is happy to share that
the K8s attributes are now at the release candidate stability level.
Next steps
Next, after the next Semantic Conventions release, the k8sattributes processor
will be updated accordingly to use the latest release_candidate K8s Semantic
Conventions behind the respective feature gates, following the Collector’s
guidelines.
This will allow users to optionally switch to the new schema using the feature
gates, enabling the community to provide feedback before the K8s attributes
Semantic Conventions are promoted to stable. During that period, the K8s
SemConv SIG will be accepting feedback while also working on K8s metrics’ and
entities’ stability. The
feature gates
processor.k8sattributes.DontEmitV0K8sConventions and
processor.k8sattributes.EmitV1K8sConventions are already available in the
k8sattributes processor and you can learn more about their usage in the
component’s
documentation
Call for feedback
So, if you are using or relying on K8s Semantic Conventions, now is the time to
provide your feedback while these are still at the release_candidate stability
level. Feel free to reach out in CNCF Slack in the
#otel-k8s-semconv-sig
channel or join one of the
K8s SemConv SIG
meetings directly. We would love to hear from you!