otel-init-go

[ THIS IS A WORK-IN-PROGRESS AND NOT EVEN EXPERIMENTAL YET ]

OpenTelemetry plumbing initializer for Go that only supports OTLP/gRPC and aims for a small code footprint and gets its configuration from environment variables exclusively. The intent is to be able to drop this into existing codebases with minimal code churn.

TODO:

• bootstrap egressing traces to a collector
• figure out how to test envvar mixes (maybe work on test server to help with this)
• metrics support?
• logs support?

API

package main

import (
    "github.com/tobert/otel-init-go/otelinit"
)

func main() {
    ctx := context.Background()
    otelShutdown := otelinit.InitOpenTelemetry(ctx, "my-amazing-application")
    defer otelShutdown(ctx)
}

Configuration

Wherever possible environment variable names will comply to OpenTelemetry standards.

If OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT is unset or empty, the init code will do almost nothing, so it's as safe as possible to add this to a service, deploy it, and configure it later.

TODO:

• add config for TLS auth

environment variable	default	example value
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT	""	localhost:4317
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_INSECURE	false	true
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS	""	key=value,k=v