Masking Span Attributes

In some situations, you may need to modify the observability level of your tracing. For instance, you may want to keep sensitive information from being logged for security reasons, or you may want to limit the size of the base64 encoded images logged to reduced payload size.

The OpenInference Specification defines a set of environment variables you can configure to suit your observability needs. In addition, the OpenInference auto-instrumentors accept a trace config which allows you to set these value in code without having to set environment variables, if that's what you prefer

The possible settings are:

Environment Variable Name	Effect	Type	Default
OPENINFERENCE_HIDE_INPUTS	Hides input value, all input messages & embedding input text	bool	False
OPENINFERENCE_HIDE_OUTPUTS	Hides output value & all output messages	bool	False
OPENINFERENCE_HIDE_INPUT_MESSAGES	Hides all input messages & embedding input text	bool	False
OPENINFERENCE_HIDE_OUTPUT_MESSAGES	Hides all output messages	bool	False
PENINFERENCE_HIDE_INPUT_IMAGES	Hides images from input messages	bool	False
OPENINFERENCE_HIDE_INPUT_TEXT	Hides text from input messages & input embeddings	bool	False
OPENINFERENCE_HIDE_OUTPUT_TEXT	Hides text from output messages	bool	False
OPENINFERENCE_HIDE_EMBEDDING_VECTORS	Hides returned embedding vectors	bool	False
OPENINFERENCE_BASE64_IMAGE_MAX_LENGTH	Limits characters of a base64 encoding of an image	int	32,000

To set up this configuration you can either:

• Set environment variables as specified above

• Define the configuration in code as shown below

• Do nothing and fall back to the default values

• Use a combination of the three, the order of precedence is:

  • Values set in the TraceConfig in code

  • Environment variables

  • default values

Below is an example of how to set these values in code using our OpenAI Python and JavaScript instrumentors, however, the config is respected by all of our auto-instrumentors.

Python

from openinference.instrumentation import TraceConfig
config = TraceConfig(        
    hide_inputs=...,
    hide_outputs=...,
    hide_input_messages=...,
    hide_output_messages=...,
    hide_input_images=...,
    hide_input_text=...,
    hide_output_text=...,
    hide_embedding_vectors=...,
    base64_image_max_length=...,
)

from openinference.instrumentation.openai import OpenAIInstrumentor
OpenAIInstrumentor().instrument(
    tracer_provider=tracer_provider,
    config=config,
)

JS

/**
 * Everything left out of here will fallback to
 * environment variables then defaults
 */
const traceConfig = { hideInputs: true } 

const instrumentation = new OpenAIInstrumentation({ traceConfig })