Understanding the processes process count data

[eric1234]

I'm trying to learn a bit about opentelemetry and exploring what the hostmetrics receiver can provide. One of the metrics is the total number of processes. When I run this on my local development machine I get 4 payloads that are labeled per process status and has a value of how many in that status. They are:

• blocked - 0
• sleeping - 9
• running - 1
• unknown - 1208

Two things I don't understand:

• Why the unknowns? What reason is there for it to not know the process state?
• Why so many? When I run ps -A | wc -l I get back only 311 process. Why does hostmetrics seem to see 4 times that many?

A few details that may shed light:

• I'm just doing this on my local dev machine so Linux
• I'm running the otel receiver within docker (using the hostfs option to give it access to host data)

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Two Days Later..

Played with this again. I was curious if running it in the container was the issue. So tried running the otel-collector directly on my host. Today, ps indicates I have about 300 processes running. When I run otel-collector directly on the host it says there are about 650 in an "unknown" state (and a handful in the other states like before). I then shut that down and immediate run it in the container again and now I have 1074 processes. So running it in the container def affects the count but it's not like running it on the host is accurate either.

[eric1234]

Looks like I found a bug in otel so taking to an issue.