Should system metrics be renamed to os (for consistency with attributes)?

[lmolkova]

We have os.name, os.version, type, etc attributes, but use system on metrics (system.cpu.time, system.memory.usage, etc).

System metrics are effectively OS metrics:

semantic-conventions/docs/system/system-metrics.md

Lines 14 to 15 in 5eb37f7

	The `system.*` namespace SHOULD be exclusively used to report hosts' metrics.
	The `system.*` namespace SHOULD only be used when the metrics are collected from within the target system. (physical servers, virtual machines etc).

We should consider renaming system to os (i.e. (os.cpu.time, ...) for the sake of consistency.

Also I'd expect system metrics to be reported with os resource (it's useful to know the OS type when interpreting specific metric), but it's not documented.

[heyams]

check here: https://github.com/open-telemetry/semantic-conventions/blob/3146dc01dc4ab477549f51ceed3b8f8cb98b5829/specification/metrics/semantic_conventions/system-metrics.md#systemos---os-specific-system-metrics

[lmolkova]

check here: https://github.com/open-telemetry/semantic-conventions/blob/3146dc01dc4ab477549f51ceed3b8f8cb98b5829/specification/metrics/semantic_conventions/system-metrics.md#systemos---os-specific-system-metrics

I assume it could still be os.windows or os.linux instead of system.windows and os.linux. Or do I miss something?

[ChrsMark]

We have os.name, os.version, type, etc attributes, but use system on metrics (system.cpu.time, system.memory.usage, etc).

Similarly we have host.* namespace which is not merged to the system.*. We had agreed as a WG group that host.* will be used for resource attributes of a system while the system.* namespace will be used for the metrics.

I assume the same applies for the os.* resource attributes which are separate and describe a distinct set of information.

We should consider renaming system to os (i.e. (os.cpu.time, ...) for the sake of consistency.

We would need some concrete use cases to change the current model which is widely used extensively by the Collector users.

[mx-psi]

We discussed this at KubeCon NA 2024 at 2024-11-14. We think we should keep things as is but document what each namespace is meant for.

[mx-psi]

Removing system blocker label (since it is already at the parent issue)

[lmolkova]

closing in favor of a better description to be added in #1578