Resource Data Model

Status: Development

A Resource is a representation of the entity producing telemetry as Attributes. For example, You could have a process producing telemetry that is running in a container on Kubernetes, which is associated to a Pod running on a Node that is a VM but also is in a namespace and possibly is part of a Deployment. Resource could have attributes to denote information about the Container, the Pod, the Node, the VM or the Deployment. All of these help identify what produced the telemetry. Note that there are certain “standard attributes” that have prescribed meanings.

A resource is composed of 0 or more Entities and 0 or more attributes not associated with any entity.

The data model below defines a logical model for an Resource (irrespective of the physical format and encoding of how resource data is recorded).

FieldTypeDescription
Entitiesset<Entity>Defines the set of Entities associated with this resource.

Entity is defined here

Attributesmap<string, standard attribute value>Additional Attributes that identify the resource.

MUST not change during the lifetime of the resource.

Follows OpenTelemetry Standard attribute definition.

Identity

Most resources are a composition of Entity. Entity includes its own notion of identity. The identity of a resource is the set of entities contained within it. Two resources are considered different if one contains an entity not found in the other.

Some resources include raw attributes in additon to Entities. Raw attributes are considered identifying on a resource. That is, if the key-value pairs of raw attributes are different, then you can assume the resource is different.