Common namespace for browser and mobile attributes

[scheler]

What are you trying to achieve?

This is with reference to this comment #3287 (comment) in a PR that is adding a few semantic conventions to browser namespace. There are some attributes that are common to both browser and mobile app instrumentations, and we were wondering what namespace to use if we have to use one common namespace for attributes that are relevant to both these domains (eg., session id, visitor id). Would client be appropriate?

cc: @MSNev @martinkuba @breedx-splk @bryce-b

[reyang]

I don't see why session or visitor/user id should be client specific (one can imagine that mobile devices, IoT devices or an ATM machine handling similar concept). Maybe just use "user.id" and "user.session"? I suggest that we learn from ECS open-telemetry/oteps#222 and try to align as much as possible.

[scheler]

@reyang it doesn't look like user namespace exists currently. There is enduser, however, so did you intend to suggest enduser.id and enduser.session instead?

We discussed the following in the Client Instrumentation SIG today -

• visitor_id and impression_id fit into user or enduser whichever we want to keep.
• session_id fits into client namespace, if that is allowed to be introduced.

I looked into ECS's client namespace - it overlaps with net namespace in OTel. If there is a plan to move the networking client aspects to client namespace, then we could use it for having session_id as well.

cc: @jsuereth

[scheler]

Closing; the common attributes will be taken up on a case by case basis.