APM tags (labels) with dot in the names

Elastic Observability APM
1

Kibana version : 7.9

Elasticsearch version : 7.9

APM Server version : 7.9

APM Agent language and version : java 1.8

Fresh install or upgraded from other version? fresh install

Is there anything special in your setup? For example, are you using the Logstash or Kafka outputs? Are you using a load balancer in front of the APM Servers? Have you changed index pattern, generated custom templates, changed agent configuration etc. :-no

I have opentracing spans created and I have added tags to my spans . Now I have to have tag names with dot(.) in it . Example labels.xxx.xxxx.

APM automatically generates labels. prefic to tag names . But I want to add one tag in between . I tried to set the tag name as xxx.xxxx but APM converts the dot underscore . How do I use a put a dot in the tag name.

example in java

protected static final String abc = "xxx.xxxx";

span.setTag(abc ,"xyz")

can I have the labels.xxx.xxxx generated by APM by any means instead of putting an underscore in the name?

2

Hi @anjana1 ,

Tag names must not have any dots in them because the way they are stored in Elasticsearch (ES), where dots are used to indicate properties & sub-properties into JSON documents. Having dots there would introduce ambiguity thus we have to normalize them without dots for proper indexing.

Thus the short answer is that it's not possible to have tags with dots in their name. How does it impacts your use-case ? Is that just an inconvenience or are there impactful consequences here ?

3

Hi @Sylvain_Juge ,

Thanks for your reply. I have a use case where I have a nested structure and wanted the values in a nested tag. I am sending almost all of the event properties as tags . Ans one among these is a hierarchical data . I have a json data in a file which displays the hierarchical data and I wanted to send these events in the same hierarchy to the APM server .