Semantic Conventions for Elasticsearch

Status: Experimental

This document defines semantic conventions to apply when creating a span for requests to Elasticsearch.

Span Name

The span name SHOULD be of the format <endpoint id>.

The elasticsearch endpoint identifier is used instead of the url path in order to reduce the cardinality of the span name, as the path could contain dynamic values. The endpoint id is the name field in the elasticsearch schema. If the endpoint id is not available, the span name SHOULD be the http.request.method.

URL path parts

Many Elasticsearch url paths allow dynamic values. These SHOULD be recorded in span attributes in the format db.elasticsearch.path_parts.<key>, where <key> is the url path part name. The implementation SHOULD reference the elasticsearch schema in order to map the path part values to their names.

[1]: when the url has dynamic values

Span attributes

db.system MUST be set to "elasticsearch".

[1]: When setting this to an SQL keyword, it is not recommended to attempt any client-side parsing of db.statement just to get this property, but it should be set if the operation name is provided by the library being instrumented. If the SQL statement has an ambiguous operation, or performs more than one operation, this value may be omitted.

[2]: Should be collected by default for search-type queries and only if there is sanitization that excludes sensitive information.

[3]: HTTP request method value SHOULD be “known” to the instrumentation. By default, this convention defines “known” methods as the ones listed in RFC9110 and the PATCH method defined in RFC5789.

If the HTTP request method is not known to instrumentation, it MUST set the http.request.method attribute to _OTHER and, except if reporting a metric, MUST set the exact method received in the request line as value of the http.request.method_original attribute.

If the HTTP instrumentation could end up converting valid HTTP request methods to _OTHER, then it MUST provide a way to override the list of known HTTP methods. If this override is done via environment variable, then the environment variable MUST be named OTEL_INSTRUMENTATION_HTTP_KNOWN_METHODS and support a comma-separated list of case-sensitive known HTTP methods (this list MUST be a full override of the default known method, it is not a list of known methods in addition to the defaults).

HTTP method names are case-sensitive and http.request.method attribute value MUST match a known HTTP method name exactly. Instrumentations for specific web frameworks that consider HTTP methods to be case insensitive, SHOULD populate a canonical equivalent. Tracing instrumentations that do so, MUST also set http.request.method_original to the original value.

[4]: For network calls, URL usually has scheme://host[:port][path][?query][#fragment] format, where the fragment is not transmitted over HTTP, but if it is known, it should be included nevertheless. url.full MUST NOT contain credentials passed via URL in form of https://username:password@www.example.com/. In such case username and password should be redacted and attribute’s value should be https://REDACTED:REDACTED@www.example.com/. url.full SHOULD capture the absolute URL when it is available (or can be reconstructed) and SHOULD NOT be validated or modified except for sanitizing purposes.

Example