Semantic Conventions for OS Process Metrics

Status: Experimental

This document describes instruments and attributes for common OS process level metrics in OpenTelemetry. Also consider the general metric semantic conventions when creating instruments not explicitly defined in this document. OS process metrics are not related to the runtime environment of the program, and should take measurements from the operating system. For runtime environment metrics see semantic conventions for runtime environment metrics.

Metric Instruments

Process

Below is a table of Process metric instruments.

Name	Instrument Type (*)	Unit	Description	Labels
process.cpu.time	Counter	s	Total CPU seconds broken down by different states.	state, if specified, SHOULD be one of: system, user, wait. A process SHOULD be characterized either by data points with no state labels, or only data points with state labels.
process.cpu.utilization	Gauge	1	Difference in process.cpu.time since the last measurement, divided by the elapsed time and number of CPUs available to the process.	state, if specified, SHOULD be one of: system, user, wait. A process SHOULD be characterized either by data points with no state labels, or only data points with state labels.
process.memory.usage	UpDownCounter	By	The amount of physical memory in use.
process.memory.virtual	UpDownCounter	By	The amount of committed virtual memory.
process.disk.io	Counter	By	Disk bytes transferred.	direction SHOULD be one of: read, write
process.network.io	Counter	By	Network bytes transferred.	direction SHOULD be one of: receive, transmit
process.threads	UpDownCounter	{thread}	Process threads count.
process.open_file_descriptors	UpDownCounter	{count}	Number of file descriptors in use by the process.
process.context_switches	Counter	{count}	Number of times the process has been context switched.	type SHOULD be one of: involuntary, voluntary
process.paging.faults	Counter	{fault}	Number of page faults the process has made.	type, if specified, SHOULD be one of: major (for major, or hard, page faults), minor (for minor, or soft, page faults).

Attributes

Process metrics SHOULD be associated with a process resource whose attributes provide additional context about the process.