OpenTelemetry Tracing SDK

The tracing module contains the foundation for all tracing SDKs of opentelemetry-js.

Used standalone, this module provides methods for manual instrumentation of code, offering full control over span creation for client-side JavaScript (browser) and Node.js.

It does not provide automated instrumentation of known libraries, context propagation or distributed-context out-of-the-box.

For a TracerProvider that includes default context management and propagation for Node.js, please see @opentelemetry/sdk-trace-node.

For a TracerProvider that includes default context management and propagation for Browser, please see @opentelemetry/sdk-trace-web.

Installation

npm install --save @opentelemetry/api
npm install --save @opentelemetry/sdk-trace-base

Usage

const { trace } = require('@opentelemetry/api');
const { BasicTracerProvider } = require('@opentelemetry/sdk-trace-base');

// To start a trace, you first need to initialize the Tracer provider.
// NOTE: The default OpenTelemetry tracer provider does not record any tracing information.
//       Registering a working tracer provider allows the API methods to record traces.
trace.setGlobalTracerProvider(new BasicTracerProvider());

// Important: requires a context manager and propagator to be registered manually.
// propagation.setGlobalPropagator(propagator);     // replace `propagator` with your `TextMapPropagator`, for example: `W3CTraceContextPropagator` from `@openetelemetry/core`
// context.setGlobalContextManager(contextManager); // replace `contextManager` with your `ContextManager`: `AsyncLocalStorageContextManager` from `@openetelemetry/async-hooks`

// To create a span in a trace, we used the global singleton tracer to start a new span.
const span = trace.getTracer('default').startSpan('foo');

// Set a span attribute
span.setAttribute('key', 'value');

// We must end the spans so they become available for exporting.
span.end();

Config

Tracing configuration is a merge of user supplied configuration with both the default configuration as specified in config.ts and an environmentally configurable sampling (via OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLER and OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLER_ARG).

Built-in Samplers

Sampler is used to make decisions on Span sampling.

AlwaysOn Sampler

Samples every trace regardless of upstream sampling decisions.

This is used as a default Sampler

const {
  AlwaysOnSampler,
  BasicTracerProvider,
} = require("@opentelemetry/sdk-trace-base");

const tracerProvider = new BasicTracerProvider({
  sampler: new AlwaysOnSampler()
});

AlwaysOff Sampler

Doesn't sample any trace, regardless of upstream sampling decisions.

const {
  AlwaysOffSampler,
  BasicTracerProvider,
} = require("@opentelemetry/sdk-trace-base");

const tracerProvider = new BasicTracerProvider({
  sampler: new AlwaysOffSampler()
});

TraceIdRatioBased Sampler

Samples some percentage of traces, calculated deterministically using the trace ID. Any trace that would be sampled at a given percentage will also be sampled at any higher percentage.

The TraceIDRatioSampler may be used with the ParentBasedSampler to respect the sampled flag of an incoming trace.

const {
  BasicTracerProvider,
  TraceIdRatioBasedSampler,
} = require("@opentelemetry/sdk-trace-base");

const tracerProvider = new BasicTracerProvider({
  // See details of ParentBasedSampler below
  sampler: new ParentBasedSampler({
    // Trace ID Ratio Sampler accepts a positional argument
    // which represents the percentage of traces which should
    // be sampled.
    root: new TraceIdRatioBasedSampler(0.5)
  });
});

ParentBased Sampler

This is a composite sampler. ParentBased helps distinguished between the following cases:
- No parent (root span).
- Remote parent with sampled flag true
- Remote parent with sampled flag false
- Local parent with sampled flag true
- Local parent with sampled flag false

Required parameters:

root(Sampler) - Sampler called for spans with no parent (root spans)

Optional parameters:

remoteParentSampled(Sampler) (default: AlwaysOn)
remoteParentNotSampled(Sampler) (default: AlwaysOff)
localParentSampled(Sampler) (default: AlwaysOn)
localParentNotSampled(Sampler) (default: AlwaysOff)

Parent	parent.isRemote()	parent.isSampled()	Invoke sampler
absent	n/a	n/a	`root()`
present	true	true	`remoteParentSampled()`
present	true	false	`remoteParentNotSampled()`
present	false	true	`localParentSampled()`
present	false	false	`localParentNotSampled()`

const {
  AlwaysOffSampler,
  BasicTracerProvider,
  ParentBasedSampler,
  TraceIdRatioBasedSampler,
} = require("@opentelemetry/sdk-trace-base");

const tracerProvider = new BasicTracerProvider({
  sampler: new ParentBasedSampler({
    // By default, the ParentBasedSampler will respect the parent span's sampling
    // decision. This is configurable by providing a different sampler to use
    // based on the situation. See configuration details above.
    //
    // This will delegate the sampling decision of all root traces (no parent)
    // to the TraceIdRatioBasedSampler.
    // See details of TraceIdRatioBasedSampler above.
    root: new TraceIdRatioBasedSampler(0.5)
  })
});

Example

See examples/basic-tracer-node for an end-to-end example, including exporting created spans.

Useful links

For more information on OpenTelemetry, visit: https://opentelemetry.io/
For more about OpenTelemetry JavaScript: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-js
For help or feedback on this project, join us in GitHub Discussions