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OpenTelemetry for Ruby

OpenTelemetry offers full support for Ruby, making it easy to add observability to your Rails apps, Sinatra services, and background jobs.

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Installation

Install the OpenTelemetry Ruby gems:

gem install opentelemetry-sdk
gem install opentelemetry-exporter-otlp
gem install opentelemetry-instrumentation-all

Or add them to your Gemfile:

gem 'opentelemetry-sdk'
gem 'opentelemetry-exporter-otlp'
gem 'opentelemetry-instrumentation-all'

For full installation instructions:
👉 OpenTelemetry Ruby Getting Started

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Auto-Instrumentation

Auto-instrumentation lets you automatically trace common libraries such as HTTP clients, database drivers, and more without needing to modify your code. OpenTelemetry provides auto-instrumentation libraries for many popular languages, making it fast to get started with tracing.

In Ruby, you can automatically instrument popular frameworks like Rails, Rack, and ActiveRecord:

require 'opentelemetry/sdk' 
require 'opentelemetry/instrumentation/all'
OpenTelemetry::SDK.configure do |c| c.use_all() end

Learn more:
👉 Ruby Auto-Instrumentation Setup

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Manual Instrumentation

Manual instrumentation gives you full control over your traces, allowing you to create spans wherever needed. You can customize span names, attributes, and relationships to capture the most important parts of your application’s flow.

You can manually create spans in your Ruby code:

tracer = OpenTelemetry.tracer_provider.tracer('my-service')
tracer.in_span('my-operation') do |span|
    your application logic
end

Learn more:
👉 Ruby Manual Instrumentation Guide

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Exporters

Once your application is instrumented, you need to export telemetry data. PlayerZero supports the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) over HTTP. You can configure your OpenTelemetry SDK to export traces, logs, and metrics to PlayerZero’s endpoint by setting the endpoint URL and API token.

You can configure the OTLP exporter via environment variables:

OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=https://sdk.playerzero.app/otlp 
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS=Authorization=Bearer <your-playerzero-token> 
OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER=otlp 
OTEL_LOGS_EXPORTER=otlp 
OTEL_METRICS_EXPORTER=otlp

Official reference:
👉 Ruby SDK Configuration

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Optional: Using a Collector

Using an OpenTelemetry Collector is optional for most setups. A collector can help route telemetry to multiple destinations, perform transformations, or batch data efficiently. You might use a collector if you want to forward telemetry to both PlayerZero and another observability platform simultaneously.

You can optionally route telemetry through an OpenTelemetry Collector before sending it to PlayerZero.

For detailed language-specific instrumentation examples and full OpenTelemetry documentation, refer to the links below.

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