---
id: opentelemetry-resourcedetector-gcp
version: "1.14.0"
license: Apache-2.0
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: active
---

# opentelemetry-resourcedetector-gcp — Google Cloud Resource Detector for OpenTelemetry

License: permissive · Maintenance: active · Downloads: 18.5M/mo

## What it is and what it does

This package extends OpenTelemetry with automatic detection of Google Cloud Platform resource identifiers. When installed, it integrates with the OpenTelemetry SDK to identify and attach GCP-specific metadata—such as project ID, instance names, and cluster information—to telemetry data, allowing observability platforms to correlate traces and metrics with the underlying cloud infrastructure.

The detector activates automatically once the package is present in your Python environment, or can be explicitly enabled via the OTEL_EXPERIMENTAL_RESOURCE_DETECTORS environment variable. It depends on opentelemetry-api, opentelemetry-sdk, and requests, and is designed for applications running on GCP infrastructure that need to enrich their observability signals with cloud context.

Use it for:

- Automatically tag traces and metrics with GCP project and instance metadata in GKE clusters.
- Enable correlation between application telemetry and GCP resource dashboards in Cloud Trace.
- Simplify multi-environment observability by auto-detecting GCE vs. GKE vs. other GCP compute contexts.
- Reduce manual configuration overhead when deploying OpenTelemetry to GCP workloads.

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

Automatically detects and reports GCP resource metadata (GCE, GKE, etc.) to OpenTelemetry, enabling observability tools to understand the cloud environment where your application runs.

Yes, if you run applications on GCP and use OpenTelemetry for observability. The package is actively maintained, has no known vulnerabilities, and integrates seamlessly with the OpenTelemetry SDK. Install it as a standard dependency in any GCP-deployed Python service using OpenTelemetry; it requires Python 3.10+ and only activates in GCP environments.

## Install

pip install opentelemetry-resourcedetector-gcp
uv add opentelemetry-resourcedetector-gcp
poetry add opentelemetry-resourcedetector-gcp

## Installing opentelemetry-resourcedetector-gcp

Before you install: Low install friction with a pure-Python wheel. Actively maintained as of 2026-07-24 with recent commits; part of the OpenTelemetry ecosystem and positioned in the top 5000 PyPI packages by download volume.

License in practice: Licensed under Apache-2.0 (permissive), allowing use in commercial and proprietary projects with minimal restrictions.

Quickstart:

pip install opentelemetry-resourcedetector-gcp

# Automatically detected by OpenTelemetry SDK when installed
# Or explicitly enable via environment variable:
# export OTEL_EXPERIMENTAL_RESOURCE_DETECTORS=gcp

Requires Python 3.10 or later; only functional in a GCP environment (GCE, GKE, etc.) where resource metadata is available.

Verify before relying:

- Whether the detector works in all GCP compute environments (Cloud Run, App Engine, etc.) or only specific ones like GCE and GKE.
- Performance overhead of resource detection on startup time.
- Backward compatibility guarantees given the Beta development status.

## Package facts

- License: Apache-2.0 (permissive)
- Python support: supports_current
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: active
- Downloads: 18.5M/month (top 5,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

gcp resource detection opentelemetry, google cloud resource detector, gke gce telemetry metadata, opentelemetry gcp integration, cloud resource attributes, gcp-integration, observability, resource-detection

[View on SkillFed](https://skillfed.io/packages/opentelemetry-resourcedetector-gcp) · [View on PyPI](https://pypi.org/project/opentelemetry-resourcedetector-gcp/)