Status: Experimental
This document includes semantic conventions for runtime environment level metrics in OpenTelemetry. Also consider the general metric, system metrics and OS Process metrics semantic conventions when instrumenting runtime environments.
Runtime environments vary widely in their terminology, implementation, and relative values for a given metric. For example, Go and Python are both garbage collected languages, but comparing heap usage between the Go and CPython runtimes directly is not meaningful. For this reason, this document does not propose any standard top-level runtime metric instruments. See OTEP 108 for additional discussion.
Metrics specific to a certain runtime environment should be prefixed with
runtime.{environment}. and follow the semantic conventions outlined in
general metric semantic
conventions. Authors of
runtime instrumentations are responsible for the choice of {environment} to
avoid ambiguity when interpreting a metric's name or values.
For example, some programming languages have multiple runtime environments
that vary significantly in their implementation, like Python which has many
implementations. For
such languages, consider using specific {environment} prefixes to avoid
ambiguity, like runtime.cpython. and runtime.pypy..
There are other dimensions even within a given runtime environment to consider, for example pthreads vs green thread implementations.