Consider using k8s workload name as the service.name

[dashpole]

Feature Request

This may be a question for semantic conventions, but I figured I would start here.

The k8s demo currently uses the app.kubernetes.io/component label as the service.name resource attribute: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-demo/blob/14bc74abf0bd7b192401af91abc60d79f4c60cfa/kubernetes/opentelemetry-demo.yaml#L9727-L9731.

This differs from the behavior of the OpenTelemetry Operator, which uses the workload (deployment, statefulset, etc.) name as the service.name resource attribute

It would be nice if there was a standard way to default the service name in k8s environments which was used in the operator and in the k8s demo.

@open-telemetry/semconv-k8s-approvers

[puckpuck]

To confirm I'm reading that code correctly, it uses the K8s Deployment name for the service.name attribute?

[jinja2]

There was a similar discussion in this now closed PR on semantic-conventions. We were looking at a different set of standard labels in the PR than the ones being discussed here. We should create a new issue to discuss this in semantic-conventions but this might be a little difficult to standardize on given the number of options.

Re: what should be our recommended way of getting the service.name? On the one hand, the name of the controller (deployment/sts) might not reflect the logical service name. For example, we split a single installation of a database cluster into statefulset per zone to have better operational control in case a zone is down. In this case, the 3 stses belong to the same logical service and our service.name equivalent attr is set to same value (which we get from a label) for pods from the 3 sts. Another more common usecase for when a logical service is likely to run as part of multiple deployments would be when practicing canary/stable deployment pattern. On the other, the standard k8s labels are just recommendations so they might not even be available on workloads which is not the case for controller name. I think the recommendation in sem-conv should be the k8s recommended label (we seem to have 3 options here, but imo app.kubernetes.io/instance is closer to logical service than others) and if not available, the controller name.

[puckpuck]

I wonder if part of the problem here is we have the Chart's release name as a prefix to every service name. If we remove that, we would more closely align with each component's service name being the same as the deployment name.