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OTEL-052: Compression disabled for network exporter

Severity: warn (advisory)

Rule Details​

Telemetry payloads are highly repetitive (resource attributes, span names, metric labels) and compress extremely well — gzip commonly reduces OTLP batches by 70–90%. Setting compression: none on a network exporter throws all of that away, inflating egress cost and slowing every request proportionally. Pull-based exporters (debug, logging, prometheus, prometheusremotewrite, file) are exempt.

This rule fires when a non-pull-based exporter sets compression: none.

Options​

This rule has no options.

Examples​

Avoid
exporters:
  otlp/backend:
    endpoint: backend:4317
    compression: none
Prefer
exporters:
  otlp/backend:
    endpoint: backend:4317
    compression: gzip

When Not To Use It​

Network paths with hardware offloaded compression (rare), or intentionally disabled compression during a CPU profiling exercise.

  • OTEL-017 — exporter missing retry_on_failure/sending_queue

Version​

Available since augur v0.1.0.

Further Reading​

Resources​