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OTEL-040: Circular pipeline dependency via connectors

Severity: deny (blocking)

Rule Details​

Connectors turn one pipeline's exporter side into another pipeline's receiver side. That is a directed graph — and a cycle in that graph means telemetry loops indefinitely between pipelines, consuming CPU and memory until one of the other rules (memory_limiter, queue size) terminates the loop. augur walks the pipeline graph and blocks any config whose connector edges form a cycle.

This rule fires when the connector-pipeline graph contains at least one cycle.

Options​

This rule has no options.

Examples​

Incorrect
connectors:
  forward/a_to_b: {}
  forward/b_to_a: {}

service:
  pipelines:
    traces/a:
      receivers: [otlp]
      exporters: [forward/a_to_b]
    traces/b:
      receivers: [forward/a_to_b]
      exporters: [forward/b_to_a]
    traces/c:
      receivers: [forward/b_to_a]
      exporters: [forward/a_to_b]   # cycle: a_to_b -> b_to_a -> a_to_b
Correct
connectors:
  forward/a_to_b: {}

service:
  pipelines:
    traces/a:
      receivers: [otlp]
      exporters: [forward/a_to_b]
    traces/b:
      receivers: [forward/a_to_b]
      exporters: [otlp/backend]

When Not To Use It​

Never — a connector cycle is always a bug.

  • OTEL-041 — routing connector without default_pipelines
  • OTEL-042 — duplicate processor in same pipeline

Version​

Available since augur v0.1.0.

Further Reading​

Resources​