Launcher, a Lightstep Distro for OpenTelemetry 🚀 [Deprecated]

In August 2023, Lightstep became ServiceNow Cloud Observability. To ease the transition, all code artifacts will continue to use the Lightstep name. You don't need to do anything to keep using this repository.

What is Launcher?

Launcher is a configuration layer that chooses default values for configuration options that many OpenTelemetry users want. It provides a single function in each language to simplify discovery of the options and components available to users. The goal of Launcher is to help users that aren't familiar with OpenTelemetry quickly ramp up on what they need to get going and instrument.

Getting started

pip install opentelemetry-launcher

Configure

Minimal setup

from opentelemetry.launcher import configure_opentelemetry
from opentelemetry import trace

configure_opentelemetry(
    service_name="service-123",
    access_token="my-token",  # optional
)

tracer = trace.get_tracer(__name__)

with tracer.start_as_current_span("foo") as span:
    span.set_attribute("attr1", "valu1")
    with tracer.start_as_current_span("bar"):
        with tracer.start_as_current_span("baz"):
            print("Hello world from OpenTelemetry Python!")

Additional tracer options

configure_opentelemetry(
    service_name="service-123",
    service_version="1.2.3",
    access_token="my-token",
    span_exporter_endpoint="https://ingest.lightstep.com:443",
    log_level=debug,
    span_exporter_insecure=False,
)

Usage with Auto Instrumentation

OpenTelemetry Python includes a command that allows the user to automatically instrument certain third party libraries. Here is an example that shows how to use this launcher with auto instrumentation.

First, create a new virtual environment:

cd ~
mkdir auto_instrumentation
virtualenv auto_instrumentation
source auto_instrumentation/bin/activate
pip install opentelemetry-launcher
pip install requests
pip install flask
opentelemetry-bootstrap -a install

Once that is done, clone the opentelemetry-python repo to get the example code:

git clone [email protected]:open-telemetry/opentelemetry-python.git
cd opentelemetry-python
git checkout v1.1.0

Set the environment variables:

export OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=auto-instrumentation-testing
export LS_ACCESS_TOKEN=<my-token>

Run the server:

cd docs/examples/auto-instrumentation
opentelemetry-instrument python server_uninstrumented.py

Run the client in a separate console:

cd docs/examples/auto-instrumentation
python client.py testing

This should produce spans that can be captured in the Lightstep Explorer.

Configuration Options

Config	Env Variable	Required	Default
service_name	OTEL_SERVICE_NAME	y	-
service_version	LS_SERVICE_VERSION	n	None
access_token	LS_ACCESS_TOKEN	n	None
metrics_enabled	LS_METRICS_ENABLED	n	False
span_exporter_endpoint	OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_ENDPOINT	n	https://ingest.lightstep.com:443
span_exporter_insecure	OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_INSECURE	n	False
propagators	OTEL_PROPAGATORS	n	b3
resource_attributes	OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES	n	telemetry.sdk.language=python,telemetry.sdk.version=0.12b0
log_level	OTEL_LOG_LEVEL	n	ERROR
metrics_exporter_endpoint	OTLP_EXPORTER_METRICS_ENDPOINT	n	https://ingest.lightstep.com:443
metrics_exporter_temporality_preference	OTLP_EXPORTER_METRICS_TEMPORALITY_PREFERENCE	n	cumulative

The configuration option for propagators accepts a comma-separated string that will be interpreted as a list. For example, a,b,c,d will be interpreted as ["a", "b", "c", "d"]. The configuration option for resource_attributes accepts a comma-separated string of key=value pairs that will be interpreted as a dictionary. For example, a=1,b=2,c=3,d=4 will be interpreted as {"a": 1, "b": 2, "c": 3, "d": 4}.

Note about metrics

Metrics support is still experimental.

Principles behind Launcher

100% interoperability with OpenTelemetry

One of the key principles behind putting together Launcher is to make lives of OpenTelemetry users easier, this means that there is no special configuration that requires users to install Launcher in order to use OpenTelemetry. It also means that any users of Launcher can leverage the flexibility of configuring OpenTelemetry as they need.

Validation

Another decision we made with launcher is to provide end users with a layer of validation of their configuration. This provides us the ability to give feedback to our users faster, so they can start collecting telemetry sooner.

Start using it today in Go, Java, Javascript and Python and let us know what you think!

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