Standard attributes
The attribute names Watchtower reads, writes or expects. Telemetry follows OpenTelemetry semantic conventions, so anything the OTel SDKs and Collector emit works unchanged. This page lists the names that have a defined meaning in Watchtower. Anything else is stored as sent.
Names in the wt.* namespace belong to the platform: incoming wt.* attributes are deleted at the gateway before Watchtower stamps its own (a sender cannot forge tenant identity or sampling). Tenant identity (project, environment) always comes from the credential, never from an attribute.
Resource attributes
Attribute | Meaning |
|---|---|
| The service. Required for traces and APM; services are grouped by it. |
| The release, used by release impact and deploy markers. |
| The environment name ( |
| The host. Infrastructure entities are built from them. |
| Where the workload runs. |
| Kubernetes placement. |
| The container. |
| Which SDK produced the data. |
Trace and log attributes
Attribute | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Correlation. A log with both opens the trace beside it. |
| HTTP spans; |
| Database spans; query text is normalized before grouping. |
| Errors; exceptions feed issue grouping. |
| The end user, for user-centric error counts. |
Platform attributes (wt.*)
Attribute | Set by | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| the sampling stage | One kept record stands for this many. Counts and rates are extrapolated by it. |
| the | How many identical records the surviving one stands for. |
| the | How many records were folded into this one. |
| the gateway | The event time was corrected (clock skew, future or too-old time). |
| the | A type cast in a pipeline failed and the original value was kept. |
| the | The retention class chosen for the record. |
| tail sampling | The retention tier stamped on a kept span. |
| the | The export destination the record is routed to. |
| tail sampling | The span was kept on its own although its trace was dropped. |
| ingest limits | A value or a record was cut to a limit. See limits. |
| browser error pipeline | The grouping fingerprint of an error; a client override is honored. |
Security log attributes
Security sources (/v1/projects/{prj}/security-sources) normalize audit logs to fixed names so one detection rule works across sources. Every record carries security.source (the source kind) and, when known, user.name and source.ip. GeoIP adds geo.country, geo.lat and geo.lon when a GeoIP database is configured.
Source kind | Attributes |
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Signals raised from a rule with a MITRE ATT&CK mapping carry the tags attack.<tactic> and attack.<technique> (lower case, for example attack.credential-access, attack.t1110.003).
Datadog reserved attributes
Data sent through the Datadog Agent intake is mapped on arrival: the log hostname (or metric host) becomes host.name and service becomes service.name. The other Datadog fields are kept as attributes under their own names. See Datadog Agent for the full intake and Datadog migration for translating queries.