Attributes

An event's attributes hold any further JSON its producer wants to keep with it: a service's version, the pipeline that ran, a description. This page explains what belongs there and what happens to it once posted. It describes Horopter v0.14.2.

Who Decides What Goes InCopy Anchor Link

attributes is free-form. Horopter stores what a producer sends and cannot know what it holds, so what goes in it is the responsibility of whoever runs the producer.

Put identifiers and short text there: a version, an environment name, a pipeline run's id, a one-paragraph description. For anything larger or more sensitive, put a link to where it lives instead. Horopter refuses an event whose attributes are larger than a few kilobytes of JSON, so a release note or a log excerpt is a link, not a value.

No Secrets, No Personal DataCopy Anchor Link

Never put a secret or personal data in an attribute. Not a token, a password, or a connection string with credentials in it; not a name, an email address or anything else that identifies a person.

What a producer posts does not stay in one place. Every attribute is:

• stored in Horopter's event log, which is append-only;
• served to every reader of the tenant, and through every adapter you configure, such as Grafana annotations and OpenTelemetry spans, which keep copies of their own;
• in your database's backups and write-ahead log archives.

Erasing it from Horopter's database does not erase those copies.

If a Secret Lands ThereCopy Anchor Link

Rotate it first. Treat the secret as exposed from the moment it was posted, and replace it wherever it is used. Removing it from Horopter afterwards is hygiene, not a fix: by then any reader of the tenant, and any tool fed by an adapter, may have it.

KeysCopy Anchor Link

Attribute keys follow the OpenTelemetry semantic conventions rather than a vocabulary of Horopter's own, so any tool that understands OpenTelemetry understands them. The keys worth aiming for:

• service.name, service.version
• deployment.environment.name
• cicd.pipeline.name, cicd.pipeline.result, cicd.pipeline.task.name, cicd.pipeline.task.run.id, cicd.pipeline.task.run.result
• cloudevents.event_id, cloudevents.event_source, cloudevents.event_type, cloudevents.event_subject

Nothing rejects a key outside this list: it is a convention, not a schema. Of these keys, readers can filter changes by deployment.environment.name.

horopter.descriptionCopy Anchor Link

One key is Horopter's own, because no OpenTelemetry convention covers it. horopter.description is a change's longer description, which the Grafana annotations adapter returns as each annotation's text. A bare description key is not read for this.