otel-launcher-python VS opentelemetry-python-contrib

If you thought it was easy-peasey to send OTel data to Lightstep à la auto-instrumentation agent, then it’s even easier to do it via the OTel Python Launcher! Think of it as an OTel wrapper to make it extra-easy to send data to Lightstep, by having a bunch of things pre-configured for you to lower that barrier to entry.

We currently have Launchers for Go, Python, Java, and Node.JS.

In my last blog post, I showed y’all how to instrument Python code with OpenTelemetry (OTel), à la auto-instrumentation. You may also recall from that post that I recommended using the Python auto-instrumentation binary even for non-auto-instrumented libraries, because it abstracts all that pesky OTel config stuff so nicely. When you use it, along with any applicable Python auto-instrumentation libraries (installed courtesy of opentelemetry-bootstrap), it takes care of context propagation across related services for you.

More specifically, auto-instrumentation uses shims or bytecode instrumentation agents to intercept your code at runtime or at compile-time to add tracing and metrics instrumentation to the libraries and frameworks you depend on. The beauty of auto-instrumentation is that it requires a minimum amount of effort. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. A number of popular Python libraries are auto-instrumented, including Flask and Django. You can find the full list here.

And sure, there's gaps and those are awful when you get to them. But writing minimal tracing integration is pretty easy. This is the full source of the psycopg2 instrumentation. https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-python-contrib/blob/main/instrumentation/opentelemetry-instrumentation-psycopg2/src/opentelemetry/instrumentation/psycopg2/__init__.py