OpenTelemetry for Python: The Hard Way

• opentelemetry-python-contrib

  3 613 9.4 Python

  OpenTelemetry instrumentation for Python modules

  

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.

• opentelemetry-specification

  99 3,602 9.2 Makefile

  Specifications for OpenTelemetry

  

Today we learned how to manually configure OpenTelemetry for Python to connect to Lightstep (this also works for any Observability back-end that ingests the OTLP format). We also learned how to link related services together through manual context propagation.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• CPython

  1,314 59,531 10.0 Python

  The Python programming language

  

A basic understanding of Python and Python virtual environments

• opentelemetry-examples

  8 56 6.6 JavaScript

  Example code and resources for working with OpenTelemetry, provided by Lightstep

  

The example in this tutorial can be found in the lightstep/opentelemetry-examples repo. We will be working with three main files:

• opentelemetry.io

  1 464 9.9 JavaScript

  The OpenTelemetry website and documentation

  

Note: Although the OpenTelemetry documentation does provide some insight into how to do manual context propagation in Python, the documentation needs a little work. I’m actually part of the OpenTelemetry Comms SIG, so I am using this as motivation to improve the docs around this topic…stay tuned for updates to the OTel docs too! 😎

• MongoDB

  248 25,418 10.0 C++

  The MongoDB Database

  

If you peek over at the terminal running server.py, you will likely notice a super-ugly stack trace. DON’T PANIC! The /ping service makes calls to Redis and MongoDB, and since neither of these services is running, you end up getting some nasty error messages like this:

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