k8sattributesprocessor fils with '"k8s.cronjob.uid" is not a supported metadata field'

[harelmo-lumigo]

Component(s)

No response

What happened?

Description

The documetation states that k8s.cronjob.uid is a valid metadata field that can be extracted, however using it in an extract.metadata sections fails.
It seems that it's not listed here, not sure if by accident or not.

Steps to Reproduce

Start a collector with the config specified below.

Expected Result

Collector starts, pod are added with the k8s.cronjob.uid resource-attribute where applicable

Actual Result

Collector fails to start with the error message specified below.

Collector version

v0.116.0

Environment information

Environment

OS: Alpine Linux 3.22.1
Compiler(if manually compiled): Go 1.23

OpenTelemetry Collector configuration

receivers:
  otlp:
    protocols:
      http:
        endpoint: 0.0.0.0:4318
exporters:
  otlphttp:
    endpoint: http://localhost:8080
processors:
  batch:
  k8sattributes:
    auth_type: serviceAccount
    passthrough: false
    extract:
      metadata:
      - k8s.cronjob.uid
    pod_association:
      - sources:
          - from: resource_attribute
            name: k8s.pod.uid  
service:
  pipelines:
    logs:
      receivers:
      - otlp
      processors:
      - k8sattributes
      exporters:
      - otlphttp

Log output

Error: invalid configuration: processors::k8sattributes: "k8s.cronjob.uid" is not a supported metadata field
2025/09/08 13:10:26 collector server run finished with error: invalid configuration: processors::k8sattributes: "k8s.cronjob.uid" is not a supported metadata field

Additional context

No response

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[paulojmdias]

/label processor/k8sattributes

[github-actions]

Pinging code owners for processor/k8sattributes: @dmitryax @fatsheep9146 @TylerHelmuth @ChrsMark. See Adding Labels via Comments if you do not have permissions to add labels yourself. For example, comment '/label priority:p2 -needs-triaged' to set the priority and remove the needs-triaged label.

[paulojmdias]

I will look into this.

It appears that the k8s.cronjob.uid is documented in README.md, but it is not being read anywhere and is neither defined in metadata.yml file.

[paulojmdias]

Looking at this part of the processor: we’re extracting k8s.cronjob.name by substring-matching from the Job name. That makes sense for the name since it helps group jobs under a logical parent, but we are referencing k8s.cronjob.uid into the README.md file, and it seems this was never implemented.

However, the README references k8s.cronjob.uid, and it looks like this was never actually implemented. So we should either remove k8s.cronjob.uid from the README, or evaluate whether it’s feasible to retrieve the CronJob UID. Technically, a Pod can be owned by a Job, and a Job can be owned by a CronJob, but I’m not sure if it’s worth cascading ownership resolution to get this data.

[ChrsMark]

Thank's @paulojmdias for investigating this! I see that there is also no extraction rule for the the k8s.cronjob.uid at

opentelemetry-collector-contrib/processor/k8sattributesprocessor/internal/kube/kube.go

Line 234 in c7e75d8

CronJobName bool

. It might have been missed so far but I think we can consider adding it. Happy to review any PRs :)

[paulojmdias]

@ChrsMark I can look into this. You can assign it to me

[ChrsMark]

Thank you @paulojmdias, assigned!