Recording multiple entities?

[tigrannajaryan]

Do we need an ability to record more than one entity in the telemetry signals? The proposal allows recording one producing entity only in the Resource. There is a long-standing issue in Otel where the ability to associate more than one entity with the signal is wanted. The issue talks about the Resource but the exact same reasoning applies to Entities. For example, to record a metric describing a communication between 2 network entities (e.g. 2 Hosts) we need to associate the metric's value with both of those entities.

If we decide to allow association of signals with more than one entity does it need to be asymmetric (e.g. Producing Entity in the Resource and an Associated Entity in the Span/LogRecord/Datapoint) or we need to make it symmetric (e.g. allow multiple Entities in the Resource instead of one Producing Entity)?

[UPDATE @tigrannajaryan] My current thinking is that Otel producers will associate telemetry with one entity only. The backends may choose to establish addition associations after the entity information is received, but we won't need to have more then one on the wire. I would like to see examples that do require multiple entity association to be recorded by Otel, when this data is produced.

[tigrannajaryan]

OTEP 0264 brought multiple entities. Closing.