[processor/resourcedetection] The ec2 detector does not retry on initial failure

[atoulme]

Component(s)

processor/resourcedetection/internal/aws/ec2

What happened?

Description

The ec2 resource detection processor attempts to connect to the metadata endpoint of AWS to get ec2 machine information on startup of the collector. If the connection to the metadata endpoint fails, the detector gives up. In some cases, the collector may run ahead of the network being ready on the machine, which may cause the collector to fail to get the information.

Steps to Reproduce

Shut down the network interface of the EC2 AWS instance
Start the collector on the EC2 AWS instance
Notice the ec2 detector reports an error in logs
Start the network interface of the EC2 instance

Expected Result

The collector should eventually add resource attributes with ec2 metadata

Actual Result

The collector never changes the output

Collector version

0.112.0

Environment information

Environment

OS: (e.g., "Ubuntu 20.04")
Compiler(if manually compiled): (e.g., "go 14.2")

OpenTelemetry Collector configuration

No response

Log output

No response

Additional context

No response

[github-actions]

Pinging code owners:

• processor/resourcedetection: @Aneurysm9 @dashpole

See Adding Labels via Comments if you do not have permissions to add labels yourself.

[dashpole]

Is this specific to ec2, or does this apply to other resource detectors as well?

[dmitryax]

We have only seen this in ec2, but I assume it's something that potentially can be seen in other detectors.

The problem is that we assume that not all configured detectors are expected to provide data. We allow not applicable detectors to silently fail at the start time.

I believe the solution would be an additional backoff retry configuration option. If that's enabled, the processor will keep retrying. Maybe we should block the collector from starting until it succeeds or retries are exhausted.

[atoulme]

Specifically in this case, the code triggered is:

opentelemetry-collector-contrib/processor/resourcedetectionprocessor/internal/aws/ec2/ec2.go

Lines 80 to 83 in 1d12566

	if _, err = d.metadataProvider.InstanceID(ctx); err != nil {
	d.logger.Debug("EC2 metadata unavailable", zap.Error(err))
	return pcommon.NewResource(), "", nil
	}

[github-actions]

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Pinging code owners:

• processor/resourcedetection: @Aneurysm9 @dashpole

See Adding Labels via Comments if you do not have permissions to add labels yourself.