Course outline

01 · Metrics with Prometheus

02 · PromQL in Depth

03 · Alerting with Alertmanager

04 · Dashboards with Grafana

05 · Logs & Traces

06 · SLOs & Production Observability

07 · OpenTelemetry Pipelines

08 · Logging Operations

09 · Tracing Practice

Stage 6 · Operate

OpenTelemetry Pipelines

Telemetry Enrichment

Adding Kubernetes metadata, cloud resource attributes, environment labels, and deployment versions.

6 min readObservability & Monitoring StackOperate

Why Enrich Telemetry?

Raw telemetry from applications often lacks infrastructure context. Adding Kubernetes pod names, namespace labels, cloud region, and environment information makes telemetry queryable and correlatable across services and infrastructure.

Kubernetes Metadata

The k8sattributes processor in the OTel Collector enriches telemetry with Kubernetes metadata. It queries the API server for pod, node, namespace, and deployment information based on pod UID or IP address.

Kubernetes attributes processor


processors:
  k8sattributes:
    extract:
      metadata:
        - k8s.namespace.name
        - k8s.deployment.name
        - k8s.replicaset.name
        - k8s.pod.name
        - k8s.node.name
        - k8s.pod.uid
    pod_association:
      - sources:
          - from: resource_attribute
            name: k8s.pod.ip
    auth_type: serviceAccount

Cloud Resource Attributes

Add cloud provider attributes to identify which region, account, and instance produced the telemetry. This is critical for multi-region deployments where you need to distinguish between regions.

Cloud resource attributes


processors:
  resource:
    attributes:
      - key: cloud.provider
        value: aws
        action: upsert
      - key: cloud.region
        value: us-east-1
        action: upsert
      - key: cloud.account.id
        value: "123456789012"
        action: upsert
      - key: host.name
        value: "${HOSTNAME}"
        action: upsert

Environment Labels

The deployment environment is one of the most useful attributes. It lets you filter dashboards and alerts by environment. Always add environment, team, and service version to every telemetry signal.

Environment enrichment


processors:
  resource:
    attributes:
      - key: deployment.environment
        value: production
        action: upsert
      - key: service.version
        value: "2.3.1"
        action: upsert
      - key: service.team
        value: platform
        action: upsert

Collector Enrichment Processors

Processor	Purpose	Source
k8sattributes	Kubernetes metadata	K8s API
resource	Static attributes	Config file
resourcedetection	Auto-detect env	System/cloud
attributes	Transform attributes	Span data

resourcedetection for auto-discovery


processors:
  resourcedetection:
    detectors: [env, system, docker]
    timeout: 5s
    override: false

Enrich at the Collector, not in code

Adding Kubernetes and cloud metadata in the Collector keeps application code clean. The application only sets service-level attributes. Infrastructure context is added by the Collector based on where the application runs.

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