Honeycomb OpenTelemetry Web

Honeycomb wrapper for OpenTelemetry in the browser.

STATUS: this library is in BETA. Data shapes are stable and safe for production. We are actively seeking feedback to ensure usability.

Latest release:

• built with OpenTelemetry JS Stable v1.23.0, Experimental v0.50.0, API v1.8.0
• compatible with OpenTelemetry Auto-Instrumentations for Web ~0.38.0

This package sets up OpenTelemetry for tracing, using our recommended practices, including:

• Useful extra attributes, or fields, related to the browser
• Easy configuration to send to Honeycomb
• Basic sampler to control event volume
• Multi span attributes
• Convenient packaging
• An informative debug mode
• Links to traces in Honeycomb
• Automatically enabled Web Vitals instrumentation

Why use this?

This wrapper is a little ahead of OpenTelemetry, so that you can get the recommended fields in before they're completely standardized.

This wrapper is at least as stable as OpenTelemetry, because it is backwards-compatible as we update it to the latest OpenTelemetry versions, semantic conventions, and recommended practices.

We test this library, with its combination of OpenTelemetry dependencies, so that you can be confident that upgrades will work.

This project provides a convenient distribution of all the code required to get traces from the browser.

Getting started

1. Install this library:

npm install @honeycombio/opentelemetry-web @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-web

2. Get a Honeycomb API key.

3. Initialize tracing at the start of your application:

import { HoneycombWebSDK, WebVitalsInstrumentation } from '@honeycombio/opentelemetry-web';
import { getWebAutoInstrumentations } from '@opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-web';

const sdk = new HoneycombWebSDK({
  apiKey: 'api-key-goes-here',
  serviceName: 'your-great-browser-application',
  instrumentations: [getWebAutoInstrumentations(), new WebVitalsInstrumentation()], // add automatic instrumentation
});
sdk.start();

4. Build and run your application, and then look for data in Honeycomb. On the Home screen, choose your application by looking for the service name in the Dataset dropdown at the top. Data should populate.

Refer to our Honeycomb documentation for more information on instrumentation and troubleshooting.

SDK Configuration

Pass these options to the HoneycombWebSDK:

name	required?	type	default value	description
apiKey	required*	string		Honeycomb API Key for sending traces directly to Honeycomb.
serviceName	optional	string	unknown_service	The name of this browser application. Your telemetry will go to a Honeycomb dataset with this name.
localVisualizations	optional	boolean	false	For each trace created, print a link to the console so that you can find it in Honeycomb. Super useful in development! Do not use in production.
sampleRate	optional	number	1	If you want to send a random fraction of traces, then make this a whole number greater than 1. Only 1 in sampleRate traces will be sent, and the rest never be created.
tracesEndpoint	optional	string	${endpoint}/v1/traces	Populate this to send traces to a route other than /v1/traces.
debug	optional	boolean	false	Enable additional logging.
dataset	optional	string		Populate this only if your Honeycomb environment is still Classic.
skipOptionsValidation	optional	boolean	false	Do not require any fields.* Use with OpenTelemetry Collector.

* Note: the apiKey field is required because this SDK really wants to help you send data directly to Honeycomb.

Send to an OpenTelemetry Collector

In production, we recommend running an OpenTelemetry Collector, so that your browser app can send traces to it for you to have control over your Honeycomb API key as well any data transformation. Your OpenTelemetry Collector can send the traces on to Honeycomb, and your API key will be in the Collector's configuration. Here is a configuration of the Honeycomb Web SDK that sends to your Collector:

{
  endpoint: "http(s)://<your-collector-url>",
  serviceName: "your-spiffy-browser-application",
  skipOptionsValidation: true // because we are not including apiKey
}

Auto-instrumentation

Here is a list of what gets instrumented automatically by including getWebAutoInstrumentations and WebVitalsInstrumentation in the list of instrumentations while initializing the SDK:

• Document & resource loading instrumentation
• Fetch request instrumentation
• XML HTTP request instrumentation
• User interaction instrumentation
• Web vitals instrumentation

Fields emitted

The SDK adds these fields to all telemetry:

name	status	static?	description	example
user_agent.original	stable	static	window.user_agent	Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/95.0.4638.54 Safari/537.36
browser.height	planned	per-span	window.innerHeight, the height of the layout viewport in pixels	287
browser.width	planned	per-span	window.innerWidth, the height of the layout viewport in pixels	1720
browser.brands	stable	static	NavigatorUAData: brands	["Not_A Brand 8", "Chromium 120", "Google Chrome 120"]
browser.name	custom	static	Best guess of browser type	"Chrome", "Chromium", "Firefox", "Safari", etc.
browser.version	custom	static	Version of browser	109.1
browser.platform	stable	static	NavigatorUAData: platform	"Windows"
browser.mobile	stable	static	NavigatorUAData: mobile	true
browser.language	stable	static	Navigator: language	"fr-FR"
browser.touch_screen_enabled	stable	static	Navigator: maxTouchPoints	true
page.url	custom	per-span		https://docs.honeycomb.io/getting-data-in/data-best-practices/#datasets-group-data-together?page=2
page.route	custom	per-span		/getting-data-in/data-best-practices/
page.search	custom	per-span		?page=2
page.hash	custom	per-span		#datasets-group-data-together
page.hostname	custom	per-span		docs.honeycomb.io
screen.width	custom	static	Total available screen width in pixels.	780
screen.height	custom	static	Total available screen height in pixels	1000
screen.size	custom	static	small (less than 768px), medium (769px - 1024px) or large (greater than 1024px), unknown if the size is missing.
honeycomb.distro.version	stable	static	package version	"1.2.3"
honeycomb.distro.runtime_version	stable	static		"browser"
entry_page.url	custom	static		https://docs.honeycomb.io/getting-data-in/data-best-practices/#datasets-group-data-together?page=2
entry_page.path	custom	static		/getting-data-in/data-best-practices/
entry_page.search	custom	static		?page=2
entry_page.hash	custom	static		#datasets-group-data-together
entry_page.hostname	custom	static		docs.honeycomb.io
entry_page.referrer	custom	static	Document: referrer	https://honeycomb.io

Static fields are added to the Resource, so they are same for every span emitted for the loaded page.

Fields that can change during the lifetime of the page are instead added to each span in a SpanProcessor.

Migration Practices

This wrapper can change faster than OpenTelemetry, and yet be more stable. This section describes how we do that.

Versioning

Our version numbers are independent of the OpenTelemetry version numbers. Check the badge at the top of this README for the OpenTelemetry version this is based on.

When OpenTelemetry releases a new version of the packages this project depends on, we update this project to use them within a week, unless our tests indicate a problem.

When the OpenTelemetry API or SDK has a major version bump, this package will, too. We also have major version bumps of our own.

Code

If there is something we want to get into OpenTelemetry, or a PR that we wish were merged already, we can incorporate that code here in parallel to working to get it published upstream.

When that code is in place upstream, we remove it here, and release a new version. When there is no change to the inputs and outputs, nothing else is required.

Fields

This project adds fields to the outgoing spans. We follow semantic convention when they exist.

For fields that aren't yet part of the semantic conventions, we give them a name. If those field names become stable with a different name, then:

1. We add the new name, and emit both for 6 months.
2. We mark the old name as deprecated in this documentation
3. We offer a configuration option to NOT emit both.
4. After that period, we add a configuration parameter to allow you to say, keep emitting that old field name.
5. A year after the semantic convention has been in place, we stop emitting the old field name at all. (at the next major version bump)

Configuration

The configuration accepted by this wrapper is based on the options available in the OpenTelemetry libraries.

When an option is not available upstream, we give it a name. If that option becomes available upstream under a different name, we migrate to that.

1. We add the new name, and accept both for 6 months.
2. We mark the old name as deprecated in this documentation, and issue a warning in debug mode.
3. After this period, the old name will be ignored (at the next major version bump).

Development

See DEVELOPING.md

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md

Support

See SUPPORT.md

Code of Conduct

See CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md