OpenTelemetry Python Configuration

The official OpenTelemetry documentation contains a lot of useful guidance for how to implement tracing. The purpose of this document is to explain how to send your telemetry data to the OpenTelemetry Collector hosted by Logit.io.

The snippet below shows a breakdown of the Command Line Arguments required to send the trace data to Logit.io

# The instrumented application is called using this command
opentelemetry-instrument

# The traces are exported to the OpenTelemetry Collector
--traces_exporter otlp

# This is where Logit.io host the OpenTelemetry Collector
--exporter_otlp_endpoint https://<your-opentelemetry-endpoint-address>:<your-opentelemetry-endpoint-port>

# This can be either grpc or http/protobuf
--exporter_otlp_traces_protocol <your-opentelemetry-protocol>

# We authenticate the access to the collector using Basic authentication in an http header (which is safe because we are using the https protocol)
--exporter_otlp_traces_headers "Authorization=Basic%20<your-encoded-opentelemetry-auth-header-value>"

# If we don't set this argument to console (and we aren't interested in sending the metrics to Logit.io) then we could receive errors in the Python IDE
--metrics_exporter console

# If we don't set the service name it will appear in Jaeger as 'unknown_service'
--service_name your-service-name

# an example of the application being instrumented (your own app details should be entered here)
python -m flask run -p 8080

So the full command including arguments is:

opentelemetry-instrument --traces_exporter otlp --exporter_otlp_endpoint https://<your-opentelemetry-endpoint-address>:<your-opentelemetry-endpoint-port> --exporter_otlp_traces_protocol <your-opentelemetry-protocol> --exporter_otlp_traces_headers "Authorization=Basic%20<your-encoded-opentelemetry-auth-header-value>" --metrics_exporter console --service_name your-service-name python -m flask run -p 8080

Instead of specifying the arguments when calling the instrumentation application you can also set these as Environment Variables.

Data should now have been sent to your Stack.

View my data

If you don't see traces please take a look at How to diagnose no data in Stack below for how to diagnose common issues.

If you don't see data appearing in your Stack after following the steps, visit the Help Centre guide for steps to diagnose no data appearing in your Stack or Chat to support now.