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

npm i lightstep-opentelemetry-launcher-node

Configure

Setup Tracing

Put the following in tracing.js

const { lightstep } = require('lightstep-opentelemetry-launcher-node');

const sdk = lightstep.configureOpenTelemetry({
  accessToken: 'YOUR ACCESS TOKEN',
  serviceName: 'otel-example',
});

// initialize and start the SDK
sdk.start();

// Gracefully shutdown the SDK
const process = require('process');
process.on('SIGTERM', () => {
  sdk
    .shutdown()
    .then(
      () => console.log('SDK shut down successfully'),
      (err) => console.log('Error shutting down SDK', err)
    )
    .finally(() => process.exit(0));
});

Run Your Application

node -r ./tracing.js app.js

Customization

While the built-in automatic instrumentation will provide good coverage for many users, there are scenarios where users may want to write custom instrumentation, or enrich the existing telemetry. Below are links to some resources about the OpenTelemetry API and some examples of its usage:

Configuration Options

Config Option	Env Variable	Required	Default
serviceName	LS_SERVICE_NAME	y	-
serviceVersion	LS_SERVICE_VERSION	n	unknown
spanEndpoint	OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_ENDPOINT	n	https://ingest.lightstep.com/traces/otlp/v0.9
metricsEndpoint	OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_METRICS_ENDPOINT	n	https://ingest.lightstep.com/metrics/otlp/v0.9
metricsReportingPeriod	OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_METRICS_PERIOD	n	30000
metricsEnabled	LS_METRICS_ENABLED	n	false
accessToken	LS_ACCESS_TOKEN	n	-
logLevel	OTEL_LOG_LEVEL	n	info
propagators	OTEL_PROPAGATORS	n	b3
resource	OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES	n	-

Additional Options

In addition the options below, the configureOpenTelemetry function will take any configuration options supported by the OpenTelemetry Node SDK package and its return value is a NodeSDK instance. See the OpenTelemetry Node SDK documentation for more details.

Upgrade Guidelines

1.3.0 to 2.0.0

NodeSDK.start() is now synchronous and no longer returns a promise. At a minimum, calls to sdk.start().then(...); should be changed to sdk.start();. It is now recommended to use a tracing.js with node -r. See the example for details.

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!

Made with @ Lightstep

sekoyo/otel-launcher-node