Error

Error Attributes

This document defines the shared attributes used to report an error.

Attribute	Type	Description	Examples	Stability
error.message	string	A message providing more detail about an error in human-readable form. [1]	Unexpected input type: string; The user has exceeded their storage quota
error.type	string	Describes a class of error the operation ended with. [2]	timeout; java.net.UnknownHostException; server_certificate_invalid; 500

[1] error.message: error.message should provide additional context and detail about an error. It is NOT RECOMMENDED to duplicate the value of error.type in error.message. It is also NOT RECOMMENDED to duplicate the value of exception.message in error.message.

error.message is NOT RECOMMENDED for metrics or spans due to its unbounded cardinality and overlap with span status.

[2] error.type: The error.type SHOULD be predictable, and SHOULD have low cardinality.

When error.type is set to a type (e.g., an exception type), its canonical class name identifying the type within the artifact SHOULD be used.

Instrumentations SHOULD document the list of errors they report.

The cardinality of error.type within one instrumentation library SHOULD be low. Telemetry consumers that aggregate data from multiple instrumentation libraries and applications should be prepared for error.type to have high cardinality at query time when no additional filters are applied.

If the operation has completed successfully, instrumentations SHOULD NOT set error.type.

If a specific domain defines its own set of error identifiers (such as HTTP or gRPC status codes), it’s RECOMMENDED to:

• Use a domain-specific attribute
• Set error.type to capture all errors, regardless of whether they are defined within the domain-specific set or not.

error.type has the following list of well-known values. If one of them applies, then the respective value MUST be used; otherwise, a custom value MAY be used.

Value	Description	Stability
_OTHER	A fallback error value to be used when the instrumentation doesn’t define a custom value.