Instrumenting

The OpenTelemetry project facilitates the instrumenting of applications. Instrumentation libraries offer a core repository per language. They may or may not offer additional repositories for automatic instrumentation or non-core components. For example, Java instrumentation libraries provide the following repositories:

• Core: Provides an implementation of the OpenTelemetry API and SDK and can be used to manually instrument an application.
• Instrumentation: All the core functionality plus automatic instrumentation for a variety of libraries and frameworks.
• Contrib: Optional components such as JMX metric gathers.

Some instrumentation libraries, for example Rust, offer a single repository that supports both manual and automatic instrumentation. Other languages, for example JS, support both manual and automatic instrumentation, but separate core components from contrib components in separate repositories.

The exact installation mechanism for OpenTelemetry varies based on the language you’re developing in, but there are some similarities covered in the sections below.

Instrumentation libraries may be offered as a distribution, see here for more information.

Automatic Instrumentation

Add dependencies

In order to enable automatic instrumentation, one or more dependencies need to be added. How dependencies are added are language specific. At a minimum, these dependencies will add OpenTelemetry API and SDK capabilities. Some languages also require per instrumentation dependencies. Exporter dependencies may also be required. For more information about the OpenTelemetry API and SDK, see the specification.

Configure OpenTelemetry Instrumentation

Configuration is available via environment variables and possibly language specific means such as system properties in Java. At a minimum, a service name must be configured to identify the service being instrumented. A variety of other configuration options are available and may include:

• Data source specific configuration
• Exporter configuration
• Propagator configuration
• Resource configuration

Manual Instrumentation

Import the OpenTelemetry API and SDK

You’ll first need to import OpenTelemetry to your service code. If you’re developing a library or some other component that is intended to be consumed by a runnable binary, then you would only take a dependency on the API. If your artifact is a standalone process or service, then you would take a dependency on the API and the SDK. For more information about the OpenTelemetry API and SDK, see the specification.

Configure the OpenTelemetry API

In order to create traces or metrics, you’ll need to first create a tracer and/or meter provider. In general, we recommend that the SDK should provide a single default provider for these objects. You’ll then get a tracer or meter instance from that provider, and give it a name and version. The name you choose here should identify what exactly is being instrumented – if you’re writing a library, for example, then you should name it after your library (i.e., com.legitimatebusiness.myLibrary or some other unique identifier) as this name will namespace all spans or metric events produced. It is also recommended that you supply a version string (i.e., semver:1.0.0) that corresponds to the current version of your library or service.

Configure the OpenTelemetry SDK

If you’re building a service process, you’ll also need to configure the SDK with appropriate options for exporting your telemetry data to some analysis backend. We recommend that this configuration be handled programmatically through a configuration file or some other mechanism. There are also per-language tuning options you may wish to take advantage of.

Create Telemetry Data

Once you’ve configured the API and SDK, you’ll then be free to create traces and metric events through the tracer and meter objects you obtained from the provider. You can also utilize a plugin or integration to create traces and metric events for you – check out the registry or your language’s repository for more information on these.

Export Data

Once you’ve created telemetry data, you’ll want to send it somewhere. OpenTelemetry supports two primary methods of exporting data from your process to an analysis backend, either directly from a process or by proxying it through the OpenTelemetry Collector.

In-process export requires you to import and take a dependency on one or more exporters, libraries that translate OpenTelemetry’s in-memory span and metric objects into the appropriate format for telemetry analysis tools like Jaeger or Prometheus. In addition, OpenTelemetry supports a wire protocol known as OTLP, which is supported by all OpenTelemetry SDKs. This protocol can be used to send data to the OpenTelemetry Collector, a standalone binary process that can be run as a proxy or sidecar to your service instances or run on a separate host. The Collector can then be configured to forward and export this data to your choice of analysis tools.

In addition to open source tools such as Jaeger or Prometheus, a growing list of companies support ingesting telemetry data from OpenTelemetry. Please see this page for more details.