Node Setup

OpenTelemetry has automatic instrumentation available for almost every Node.js stack. Include the autoinstrumentation package by installing the following:

npm install --save @opentelemetry/api
npm install --save @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node

This module includes auto instrumentation for all supported instrumentations and all available data exporters. This includes many popular frameworks such as Fastify, Express, redis, graphql, aws-lambda, and dozens others. It provides a completely automatic, out-of-the-box experience. Please see the Supported Instrumentations section for more information.

The module is enabled and highly configurable using environment variables.

You can enable Node auto-instrumentation via an environment variable before running Node.

export NODE_OPTIONS="--require @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node/register"

Many aspects of the auto instrumentation’s behavior can be configured for your needs, such as resource detectors, exporter choice, exporter configuration, trace context propagation headers, and much more. Instrumentation configuration is not yet supported through environment variables. Users that require instrumentation configuration must initialize OpenTelemetry programmatically.

export OTEL_SERVICE_NAME="<dataset namespace name>"
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT="https://sdk.playerzero.app/otlp"

export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS="Authorization=Bearer <your PlayerZero ingest token>"

export OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER="otlp"
export OTEL_METRICS_EXPORTER="otlp"
export OTEL_LOGS_EXPORTER="otlp"

Out of the box, all the resource detectors are enabled. If you get some sort of an error, such as “Process is not running in a K8S server” or something else like that, you can scope the resource detectors to a more limited set. You can find the full list of resource detectors here.

export OTEL_NODE_RESOURCE_DETECTORS="env,host,os,serviceinstance,process"

With these environment variables, you will finally be able to start your server with autoinstrumentation:

node app.js