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_HIDE_LLM_INVOCATION_PARAMETERS

Hides LLM invocation parameters

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.

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=...,
    hide_llm_invocation_parameters=...,
    base64_image_max_length=...,
)

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

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