OpenTelemetry Python

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Getting Started   •   API Documentation   •   Getting In Touch (GitHub Discussions)

Contributing   •   Examples

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This page describes the Python OpenTelemetry implementation. OpenTelemetry is an observability framework for cloud-native software.

Requirements

Unless otherwise noted, all published artifacts support Python 3.6 or higher. See CONTRIBUTING.md for additional instructions for building this project for development.

Getting started

The goal of OpenTelemetry is to provide a single set of APIs to capture distributed traces and metrics from your application and send them to an observability platform. This project lets you do just that for applications written in Python.

This repository includes multiple installable packages. The opentelemetry-api package includes abstract classes and no-op implementations that comprise the OpenTelemetry API following the OpenTelemetry specification. The opentelemetry-sdk package is the reference implementation of the API.

Libraries that produce telemetry data should only depend on opentelemetry-api, and defer the choice of the SDK to the application developer. Applications may depend on opentelemetry-sdk or another package that implements the API.

The API and SDK packages are available on the Python Package Index (PyPI). You can install them via pip with the following commands:

pip install opentelemetry-api
pip install opentelemetry-sdk

The exporter/ directory includes OpenTelemetry exporter packages. You can install the packages separately with the following command:

pip install opentelemetry-exporter-{exporter}

The propagator/ directory includes OpenTelemetry propagator packages. You can install the packages separately with the following command:

pip install opentelemetry-propagator-{propagator}

To install the development versions of these packages instead, clone or fork this repository and perform an editable install:

pip install -e ./opentelemetry-api
pip install -e ./opentelemetry-sdk
pip install -e ./instrumentation/opentelemetry-instrumentation-{instrumentation}

For additional exporter and instrumentation packages, see the opentelemetry-python-contrib repository.

Running Performance Tests

This section provides details on how to reproduce performance tests results on your own machine.

Resource Usage Tests

1. Install scalene using the following command

pip install scalene

2. Run the scalene tests on any of the example Python programs

scalene opentelemetry-<PACKAGE>/tests/performance/resource-usage/<PATH_TO_TEST>/profile_resource_usage_<NAME_OF_TEST>.py

Python Version Support Addition and Removal

This project supports the latest Python versions. As new Python versions are released, support for them is added and as old Python versions reach their end of life, support for them is removed.

We add support for new Python versions no later than 3 months after they become stable.

We remove support for old Python versions 6 months after they reach their end of life.

Documentation

The online documentation is available at https://opentelemetry-python.readthedocs.io/. To access the latest version of the documentation, see https://opentelemetry-python.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.

Contributing

For information about contributing to OpenTelemetry Python, see CONTRIBUTING.md.

We meet weekly on Thursdays at 9AM PST. The meeting is subject to change depending on contributors' availability. Check the OpenTelemetry community calendar for specific dates and Zoom meeting links.

Meeting notes are available as a public Google doc. For edit access, get in touch on GitHub Discussions.

Approvers (@open-telemetry/python-approvers):

• Aaron Abbott, Google
• Alex Boten, Lightstep
• Srikanth Chekuri
• Owais Lone, Splunk
• Nathaniel Ruiz Nowell, AWS

For more information about the approver role, see the community repository.

Maintainers (@open-telemetry/python-maintainers):

• Diego Hurtado, Lightstep
• Leighton Chen, Microsoft

For more information about the maintainer role, see the community repository.

Thanks to all the people who already contributed!

Project Status

For project boards and milestones, see the following links:

• Project boards
• Milestones

We try to keep these links accurate, so they're the best place to go for questions about project status. The dates and features described in the issues and milestones are estimates and subject to change.