Semantic guidelines for the hw.type attribute in hardware metrics

[sebastien-rosset]

What are you trying to achieve?

Improve the semantic guidelines for the hw.type attribute.

What did you expect to see?

Under Common hardware Metrics, the hw.type attribute is defined as the Type of the component and the following examples are provided:

battery, cpu, disk_controller, enclosure, fan, gpu, logical_disk, memory, network, physical_disk, power_supply, tape_drive, temperature, voltage.

Since the section is about hardware, the definition can be interpreted as the Type of the hardware component.

All items except the last two are actual hardware components. "temperature" and "voltage" stand out as two anomalies, they are not hardware components. I think most people would agree "temperature" is not a component. Furthermore, many hardware components which are listed (batteries, CPUs...) have temperature and voltage sensors.

I was expecting the list of examples to have no anomaly.

Additional context.

A hardware component such as network adapter may be associated with different sensors and instruments. for example, given a network adapter component:

1. the network instrument reports I/O metrics
2. the temperature instrument reports temperature metrics.
3. the voltage instrument reports voltage metrics.
4. the humidity instrument reports humidity metrics.

As an example, a smart NIC is a single hardware component that could report the following metrics:

• Metrics for network counters: bytes, packets, errors.
• Metrics for flow telemetry, e.g. Netflow.
• Metrics for access control (firewall metrics), e.g. packets dropped, forwarded, etc.
• Metrics for data in-transit encryption, e.g. TLS offload.
• Metrics for data at-rest encryption.
• Metrics for environment data, e.g. temperature, voltage, current...

In that scenario, one hardware component is associated with multiple instrument types.

Proposal

Maybe the hw.type attribute should be defined as the Type of the instrument instead of Type of component? This attribute seems to refer to a grouping of metrics rather that component.