Overview

Telemetry data often contains rich information encoded in strings that could be more useful if broken down into structured attributes. Dash0's derived attributes feature automatically parses and extracts meaningful information from your telemetry data during ingestion, creating additional attributes that make your data easier to query, filter, and analyze.

One of the most common use cases for derived attributes is parsing user agent strings. Rather than searching through raw user agent strings to understand browser types, device categories, or operating systems, Dash0 automatically extracts this information into dedicated attributes, enabling you to quickly segment users by browser, identify mobile traffic, or filter out bot requests.

Understanding Derived Attributes

Derived attributes transform complex string data into structured, queryable fields. When parsing user agent strings, for example, Dash0 takes a single user_agent.original attribute and generates multiple specific attributes.

For example, when Dash0 receives a trace span with a user agent string like:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 14_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/14.1.1 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1

The ingestion pipeline automatically extracts and adds these attributes:

user_agent.name: Safari
user_agent.version: 14.1.1
user_agent.os.name: iOS
user_agent.os.version: 14.6
browser.mobile: true

This enrichment happens transparently at ingestion time without requiring any changes to your instrumentation code or application logic.

How Derived Attributes Work

When telemetry data is received, Dash0 examines incoming attributes and applies the appropriate enrichment. For user agent strings, Dash0 parses the string and generates additional attributes before the data is indexed and stored.

Browser Information: Extracts the browser name and version, making it easy to analyze browser-specific issues or adoption rates.
Operating System Details: Identifies the OS name and version, helping you understand your user base's platform distribution.
Device Classification: Determines whether the request came from a mobile device, enabling mobile-specific analysis.
Bot Detection: Automatically flags synthetic traffic from bots, allowing you to separate real user traffic from automated requests.

These derived attributes make it simple to create queries like "show me all errors from mobile Safari users" or "compare performance across different operating systems" without needing to parse user agent strings in your queries.

Generated Attributes Reference

Dash0 generates the following attributes from user agent strings:

Attribute	Type	Description	Example
`user_agent.name`	string	Browser or user agent name	"`Chrome`", "`Safari`", "`Firefox`"
`user_agent.version`	string	Browser or user agent name	"`91.0.4472.124`"
`user_agent.os.name`	string	Operating system name	"`Windows`", "`iOS`", "`Android`"
`user_agent.os.version`	string	Operating system name	"`10.0`", "`14.6`"
`user_agent.synthetic.type`	string	Set to "bot" if identified as automated traffic	"`bot`"
`browser.mobile`	boolean	Indicates if the request is from a mobile device	`true`, `false`

These attributes follow OpenTelemetry semantic conventions, ensuring consistency with the rest of your telemetry data.