add user-agent spec + gherkin spec

[SylvainJuge]

• Adding a shared spec for HTTP user-agent header value
• Adding gherkin executable spec (might be overkill)

Fixes #509

[ghost]

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• Start Time: 2021-10-11T14:55:19.200+0000

• Duration: 6 min 7 sec

• Commit: 0e2bc44

[felixbarny]

Thanks!

[bryce-b]

since the iOS agent routes through open-telemetry, will that need to be taken into account? I'm pretty sure there is are relevant Otel headers that are transmitted, but they may need to be normalized to a common, Elastic compatible format. It could be valuable to a generalized solution for all Otel sources in that regard, but it's totally possible for iOS to conform to this spec as well.

[SylvainJuge]

since the iOS agent routes through open-telemetry, will that need to be taken into account? I'm pretty sure there is are relevant Otel headers that are transmitted, but they may need to be normalized to a common, Elastic compatible format. It could be valuable to a generalized solution for all Otel sources in that regard, but it's totally possible for iOS to conform to this spec as well.

I haven't found anything in the OTLP specification about this. I think that as we currently use HTTP to communicate with apm-server it would be relevant for the iOS agent to conform to this to help debugging, especially when devices are in the wild it would be convenient to gather statistics about agent versions and/or which services from server HTTP access logs.

[Mpdreamz]

Have we considered aligning this spec with the clients specification for user-agent? I think the only change needed would be

- {elasticapm-${language}/${agent.version}
+ {repository-name}/${agent.version}

And inclusion of service name version in brackets

- elasticapm-python/6.4.0 myservice/v42.7
+ apm-agent-python/6.4.0 (myservice v42.7)

https://github.com/elastic/clients-team/blob/master/knowledgebase/specifications/030-user-agent.md

Out of scope but raising for awareness: The clients also expose a 2nd headerfor more metadata that Cloud understands and generates reports over:

https://github.com/elastic/clients-team/blob/master/knowledgebase/specifications/client-meta-header.md

We might want to align the constraints on version numbers from that spec too

[SylvainJuge]

That's a very good idea @Mpdreamz ! I'll update the current spec to match this.

Thanks for providing a link to the spec in clients-team repo too (not public unfortunately), we could also use that as a later improvement (or to provide what is being removed for the Node.js agent).

[trentm]

If it helps others, here is the Node.js implementation of this: elastic/apm-agent-nodejs@052e396

Mostly of possible interest is the sanitization of serviceName and serviceVersion before including in the User-Agent string via:

const commentBadChar = /[^\t \x21-\x27\x2a-\x5b\x5d-\x7e\x80-\xff]/g
const sanitizedServiceVersion = conf.serviceVersion.replace(commentBadChar, '_')
...