Some components have scenarios that could cause issues. Some components require the collector be interacted with in a specific way in order to ensure the component works as intended. This document describes common warnings that may affect a component in the collector.
Visit a component's README to see if it is affected by any of these standard warnings.
Incorrect usage of the component may lead to telemetry data that is unsound i.e. not spec-compliant/meaningless. This would most likely be caused by converting metric data types or creating new metrics from existing metrics.
The component keeps state related to telemetry data and therefore needs all data from a producer to be sent to the same Collector instance to ensure a correct behavior. Examples of scenarios that require state would be computing/exporting delta metrics, tail-based sampling and grouping telemetry.
The component may change the identity of a metric or the identity of a timeseries. This could be done by modifying the metric/timeseries's name, attributes, or instrumentation scope. Modifying a metric/timeseries's identity could result in a metric/timeseries identity conflict, which caused by two metrics/timeseries sharing the same name, attributes, and instrumentation scope.
The component modifies the incoming telemetry in such a way that a span becomes orphaned, that is, it contains a trace_id or parent_span_id that does not exist. This may occur because the component can modify span_id, trace_id, or parent_span_id or because the component can delete telemetry.