Setting service.name and service.version - recommended way to do it across languages?

[cartermp]

As we know, service.name is a required resource attribute and service.version is a "this is not required but you should really set this damn thing" resource attribute too.

The two major ways to set these are in code or environment variables. Each has a drawback though:

• If you set it in code, these will get picked up by manual instrumentation. But automatic instrumentation (e.g. from an agent) may not pick them up, and so you can be in a situation where your service.name is actually unknown_service for automatic instrumentation, but your manual instrumentation has the right service.name.
• If you set it in environment variables, then this effectively makes it required to use environment variables with automatic instrumentation, thus making things more complicated (you now need to remember to set this in every environment your app runs in, you can't keep track of these values in your actual service code, etc.)

In Honeycomb docs, we've opted for the environment variable route: https://docs.honeycomb.io/getting-started/quickstart/#add-auto-instrumentation-to-your-application

The rationale is that it's better to be correct (and frankly follow some best practices)

Should this also be done for all docs here?

[MikeGoldsmith]

An addition to option 1) would be to ensure SDKs that manually set service.name also set the corresponding environment variables so auto instrumentation picks them up. This would likely be an spec and subsequent SDK change.

[cartermp]

Here's where we're at for setting service names for getting started:

Language	Sets service name?	Using Env Var so it works with agents (if/should they exist)
C++	no	no
.NET	yes	yes
Erlang/Elixir	no	no
Go	yes	no
Java	no	no
JavaScript	no	no
PHP	no	no
Python	yes	yes
Ruby	yes	no
Rust	no	no
Swift	no	no

[svrnm]

+1 for this, we can turn this into a meta issue once again and tackle languages 1-by-1