Getting Started • Getting Involved • Getting In Touch
Contributing • Scope • Roadmap
OpenTelemetry Instrumentation for Java
- About
- Getting Started
- Configuring the Agent
- Supported libraries, frameworks, and application servers
- Manually instrumenting
- Logger MDC auto-instrumentation
- Troubleshooting
- Roadmap to 1.0 (GA)
- Contributing
About
This project provides a Java agent JAR that can be attached to any Java 8+ application and dynamically injects bytecode to capture telemetry from a number of popular libraries and frameworks. You can export the telemetry data in a variety of formats. You can also configure the agent and exporter via command line arguments or environment variables. The net result is the ability to gather telemetry data from a Java application without code changes.
Getting Started
Download the latest version.
This package includes the instrumentation agent as well as instrumentations for all supported libraries and all available data exporters. The package provides a completely automatic, out-of-the-box experience.
Enable the instrumentation agent using the -javaagent
flag to the JVM.
java -javaagent:path/to/opentelemetry-javaagent-all.jar \
-jar myapp.jar
By default, the OpenTelemetry Java agent uses
OTLP exporter
configured to send data to
OpenTelemetry collector
at http://localhost:4317
.
Configuration parameters are passed as Java system properties (-D
flags) or
as environment variables. See below for a full list of environment variables. For example:
java -javaagent:path/to/opentelemetry-javaagent-all.jar \
-Dotel.traces.exporter=zipkin \
-jar myapp.jar
Configuring the Agent
The agent is highly configurable! Many aspects of the agent's behavior can be configured for your needs, such as exporter choice, exporter config (like where data is sent), trace context propagation headers, and much more.
Click here to see the detailed list of configuration environment variables and system properties.
Note: Config parameter names are very likely to change over time, so please check back here when trying out a new version! Please report any bugs or unexpected behavior you find.
Supported libraries, frameworks, and application servers
We support an impressively huge number of libraries and frameworks and a majority of the most popular application servers...right out of the box! Click here to see the full list and to learn more about disabled instrumentation and how to suppress unwanted instrumentation.
Manually instrumenting
For most users, the out-of-the-box instrumentation is completely sufficient and nothing more has to be done. Sometimes, however, users wish to add attributes to the otherwise automatic spans, or they might want to manually create spans for their own custom code.
See here for detailed instructions.
Logger MDC (Mapped Diagnostic Context) auto-instrumentation
It is possible to inject trace information like trace id and span id into your custom application logs.
See Logger MDC auto-instrumentation
Troubleshooting
To turn on the agent's internal debug logging:
-Dotel.javaagent.debug=true
Note: These logs are extremely verbose. Enable debug logging only when needed. Debug logging negatively impacts the performance of your application.
Roadmap to 1.0 (GA)
See GA Requirements
Contributing
See CONTRIBUTING.md.
Triagers (@open-telemetry/java-instrumentation-triagers):
- Jason Plumb, Splunk
- Sergei Malafeev, Lightstep
Approvers (@open-telemetry/java-instrumentation-approvers):
- John Watson, Splunk
- Pavol Loffay, Traceable.ai
Maintainers (@open-telemetry/java-instrumentation-maintainers):
- Anuraag Agrawal, AWS
- Mateusz Rzeszutek, Splunk
- Nikita Salnikov-Tarnovski, Splunk
- Trask Stalnaker, Microsoft
- Tyler Benson, DataDog
Learn more about roles in the community repository.
Thanks to all the people who already contributed!