Glossary
The OpenTelemetry project uses terminology you might not be familiar with. In addition, the project defines the terminology in a different way than others. This page captures terminology used in the project and what it means.
Generic terminology
Aggregation
The process of combining multiple measurements into exact or estimated statistics about the measurements that took place during an interval of time, during program execution. Used by the Metric Data source.
API
Application Programming Interface. In the OpenTelemetry project, used to define how telemetry data is generated per Data source.
Application
One or more Services designed for end users or other applications.
APM
Application Performance Monitoring is about monitoring software applications, their performance (speed, reliability, availability, and so on) to detect issues, alerting and tooling for finding the root cause.
Attribute
OpenTelemetry term for Metadata. Adds key-value information to the entity producing telemetry. Used across Signals and Resources. See attribute spec.
Automatic instrumentation
Refers to telemetry collection methods that do not require the end-user to modify application’s source code. Methods vary by programming language, and examples include bytecode injection or monkey patching.
Baggage
A mechanism for propagating Metadata to help establish a causal relationship between events and services. See baggage spec.
Client library
See Instrumented library.
Client-side app
A component of an Application that is not running inside a private infrastructure and is typically used directly by end-users. Examples of client-side apps are browser apps, mobile apps, and apps running on IoT devices.
Collector
A vendor-agnostic implementation on how to receive, process, and export telemetry data. A single binary that can be deployed as an agent or gateway.
Also known as the OpenTelemetry Collector. More on the Collector here.
Contrib
Several Instrumentation Libraries and the
Collector offer a set of core capabilities as well as a dedicated
contrib repository for non-core capabilities including vendor Exporters
.
Context propagation
Allows all Data sources to share an underlying context mechanism for storing state and accessing data across the lifespan of a Transaction. See context propagation spec.
DAG
Data source
See Signal
Dimension
A term used specifically by Metrics. See Attribute.
Distributed tracing
Tracks the progression of a single Request, called a Trace, as it is handled by Services that make up an Application. A Distributed trace transverses process, network and security boundaries.
See Distributed tracing.
Distribution
A distribution is a wrapper around an upstream OpenTelemetry repository with some customizations. See more.
Event
Something that happened where representation depends on the Data source. For example, Spans.
Exporter
Provides functionality to emit telemetry to consumers. Exporters can be push- or pull-based.
Field
A term used specifically by Log Records. Metadata
can be added through defined fields, including Attributes and
Resource. Other fields may also be considered Metadata
, including
severity and trace information. See the field spec.
gRPC
A high-performance, open source universal RPC framework. More on gRPC here.
HTTP
Short for Hypertext Transfer Protocol.
Instrumented library
Denotes the Library for which the telemetry signals (Traces, Metrics, Logs) are gathered. See more.
Instrumentation library
Denotes the Library that provides the instrumentation for a given Instrumented library. Instrumented library and Instrumentation library can be the same Library if it has built-in OpenTelemetry instrumentation. See the lib specification.
JSON
Short for JavaScript Object Notation.
Label
A term used specifically by Metrics. See Metadata.
Language
Programming Language.
Library
A language-specific collection of behavior invoked by an interface.
Log
Sometimes used to refer to a collection of Log records. Can be
ambiguous since people also sometimes use Log to refer to a single
Log record. Where ambiguity is possible, use additional
qualifiers, for example, Log record
. See more
Log record
A recording of an Event. Typically, the record includes a timestamp indicating when the Event happened as well as other data that describes what happened, where it happened, and so on. See more.
Metadata
A key-value pair, for example foo="bar"
, added to an entity producing
telemetry. OpenTelemetry calls these pairs Attributes. In
addition, Metrics have Dimensions an Labels,
while Logs have Fields.
Metric
Records a data point, either raw measurements or predefined aggregation, as time series with Metadata. See more.
OC
Short form for OpenCensus.
OpenCensus
A set of libraries for various languages that allow you to collect application metrics and distributed traces, then transfer the data to a backend of your choice in real time. Precursor to OpenTelemetry. See more.
OpenTracing
Vendor-neutral APIs and instrumentation for distributed tracing. Precursor to OpenTelemetry. See more.
OT
Short form for OpenTracing.
OTel
Short form for OpenTelemetry.
OTelCol
Short form for OpenTelemetry Collector.
OTLP
Short for OpenTelemetry Protocol.
Propagators
Used to serialize and deserialize specific parts of telemetry data such as span context and Baggage in Spans. See more.
Proto
Language independent interface types. See more.
Receiver
The term used by the Collector to define how telemetry data is received. Receivers can be push- or pull-based. See more.
Request
See Distributed Tracing.
Resource
Captures information about the entity producing telemetry as
Attributes. For example, a process producing telemetry that is
running in a container on Kubernetes has a process name, a pod name, a
namespace, and possibly a deployment name. All these attributes can be included
in the Resource
.
REST
Short for Representational State Transfer.
RPC
Short for Remote Procedure Call.
Sampling
A mechanism to control the amount of data exported. Most commonly used with the Tracing Data Source. See more.
SDK
Short for Software Development Kit. Refers to a telemetry SDK that denotes a Library that implement the OpenTelemetry API.
Semantic conventions
Defines standard names and values of Metadata in order to provide vendor-agnostic telemetry data.
Service
A component of an Application. Multiple instances of a Service are typically deployed for high availability and scalability. A Service can be deployed in multiple locations.
Signal
One of Traces, Metrics or Logs. More on Signals here.
Span
Represents a single operation within a Trace. See more.
Span link
A span link is a link between causally-related spans. For details see Links between spans and Specifying Links.
Specification
Describes the cross-language requirements and expectations for all implementations. See more.
Status
The result of the operation. Typically used to indicate whether an error occurred. See more.
Tag
See Metadata.
Trace
A DAG of Spans, where the edges between Spans are defined as parent-child relationship. See more.
Tracer
Responsible for creating Spans. See more.
Transaction
See Distributed Tracing.
zPages
An in-process alternative to external exporters. When included, they collect and aggregate tracing and metrics information in the background; this data is served on web pages when requested. See more.
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