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Rollingspanlatency Processor

Status Maintainers: @atoulme, @rnterbush, @pavankrish123 Source: opentelemetry-collector-contrib

Supported Telemetry

Traces

Overview

Labels spans as slow or very_slow based on a per-key rolling latency baseline, so that downstream tail-sampling, alerting, or routing decisions can react to spans that are anomalously slow relative to their own historical behavior rather than a fixed static threshold. For each incoming span, the processor computes a key from the span name and a configurable set of resource attributes (e.g. service name, namespace, deployment environment), and maintains an exponentially-weighted moving average (EWMA) of that key’s duration. Once a key has accumulated enough observations to warm up, spans whose duration deviates from the rolling mean by more than a configured number of standard deviations are labeled accordingly.
[!NOTE] This component currently only establishes its configuration and component structure. The rolling-baseline tracking and attribute-labeling logic will be added in a follow-up PR, per the donation process. Until then, this processor passes traces through unchanged.

Configuration

Warnings

resource_key_attributes combined with the span name determines the cardinality of tracked baselines. Choosing attributes with many unique values (e.g. a per-request ID) can lead to unbounded memory growth; use max_baselines to bound this and watch for the high-cardinality warning gated by churn_warning_ratio.
Last generated: 2026-09-14