JSON Schema Definitions for OpenTelemetry File Configuration

This repository contains the JSON schema that defines the OpenTelemetry configuration. This schema can be utilized to generate model code for implementations and to validate the structure of a configuration file. The repository comes as a result of OTEP #225, where JSON schema was chosen for the following reasons:

• support for client-side validation
• code generation
• broad support across languages

Code generation

There are several tools available to generate code from a JSON schema. The following shows an example for generating code from the JSON schema in Go:

go-jsonschema \
    -p telemetry \
    --schema-package=https://opentelemetry.io/otelconfig/opentelemetry_configuration.json=github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector/schema \
    ./schema/opentelemetry_configuration.json

Stability definition

Before reaching 1.0, each minor version change is equivalent to major version change. That is, there are no guarantees about compatibility and all changes are permitted. As of 1.0, we provide the following stability guarantees:

• For major version: No guarantees.
• For minor versions: TBD

Allowable changes:

• For major versions: All changes are permitted.
• For minor versions: TBD

Schema Modeling Guidelines

The following guidelines are used to model the configuration schema:

• To remove redundant information from the configuration file, prefixes for data produced by each of the providers will be removed from configuration options. For example, under the meter_provider configuration, metric readers will be identified by the word readers rather than by metric_readers. Similarly, the prefix span_ will be dropped for tracer provider configuration, and logrecord for logger provider.
• Use wildcard * (match any number of any character, including none) and ? (match any single character) instead of regex. If a single property with wildcards is likely to be insufficient, accept included and excluded properties, each with an array of strings with wildcard entries. The wildcard entries should be joined with a logical OR. If included is not specified, assume that all entries are included. Apply excluded after applying included. Examples:
  • Given excluded: ["a*"]: Match all except values starting with a.
  • Given included: ["a*", "b*"], excluded: ["ab*"]: Match any value starting with a or b, excluding values starting with ab.
  • Given included: ["a", "b"], excluded: ["a"]: Match values equal to b.