@opentelemetry/instrumentation-http

What is @opentelemetry/instrumentation-http?

The @opentelemetry/instrumentation-http package is part of the OpenTelemetry project, which provides a collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces) to help you analyze your software's performance and behavior. This specific package provides automatic instrumentation for HTTP and HTTPS requests in Node.js applications, allowing developers to capture detailed information about incoming and outgoing requests.

What are @opentelemetry/instrumentation-http's main functionalities?

Automatic Tracing of HTTP Requests

This feature automatically traces all HTTP and HTTPS requests made or received by your application. The code sample initializes a NodeTracerProvider, registers it, and then enables the HTTP instrumentation to start tracing HTTP requests.

const { NodeTracerProvider } = require('@opentelemetry/node');
const { HttpInstrumentation } = require('@opentelemetry/instrumentation-http');

const provider = new NodeTracerProvider();
provider.register();

const httpInstrumentation = new HttpInstrumentation();
httpInstrumentation.enable();

Configurable Instrumentation

This feature allows developers to configure which requests should be ignored by the instrumentation. In the code sample, the instrumentation is configured to ignore incoming requests to '/healthz' and outgoing requests to 'example.com'.

const { HttpInstrumentation } = require('@opentelemetry/instrumentation-http');
const httpInstrumentation = new HttpInstrumentation({
  ignoreIncomingPaths: [ /healthz/ ],
  ignoreOutgoingUrls: [ /example.com/ ]
});
httpInstrumentation.enable();

Other packages similar to @opentelemetry/instrumentation-http

dd-trace

dd-trace is a DataDog tracing library that also provides automatic instrumentation for HTTP requests among other integrations. It is similar to @opentelemetry/instrumentation-http but is specifically tailored for integration with DataDog's monitoring and analytics platform, whereas OpenTelemetry provides vendor-neutral instrumentation.

README

OpenTelemetry HTTP and HTTPS Instrumentation for Node.js

Note: This is an experimental package under active development. New releases may include breaking changes.

This module provides automatic instrumentation for http and https.

For automatic instrumentation see the @opentelemetry/sdk-trace-node package.

Installation

npm install --save @opentelemetry/instrumentation-http

Usage

OpenTelemetry HTTP Instrumentation allows the user to automatically collect trace data and export them to their backend of choice, to give observability to distributed systems.

To load a specific instrumentation (HTTP in this case), specify it in the Node Tracer's configuration.

const { HttpInstrumentation } = require('@opentelemetry/instrumentation-http');
const {
  ConsoleSpanExporter,
  NodeTracerProvider,
  SimpleSpanProcessor,
} = require('@opentelemetry/sdk-trace-node');
const { registerInstrumentations } = require('@opentelemetry/instrumentation');

const provider = new NodeTracerProvider();

provider.addSpanProcessor(new SimpleSpanProcessor(new ConsoleSpanExporter()));
provider.register();

registerInstrumentations({
  instrumentations: [new HttpInstrumentation()],
});

See examples/http for a short example.

Http instrumentation Options

Http instrumentation has few options available to choose from. You can set the following:

Options	Type	Description
applyCustomAttributesOnSpan	HttpCustomAttributeFunction	Function for adding custom attributes
requestHook	HttpRequestCustomAttributeFunction	Function for adding custom attributes before request is handled
responseHook	HttpResponseCustomAttributeFunction	Function for adding custom attributes before response is handled
startIncomingSpanHook	StartIncomingSpanCustomAttributeFunction	Function for adding custom attributes before a span is started in incomingRequest
startOutgoingSpanHook	StartOutgoingSpanCustomAttributeFunction	Function for adding custom attributes before a span is started in outgoingRequest
ignoreIncomingRequestHook	IgnoreIncomingRequestFunction	Http instrumentation will not trace all incoming requests that matched with custom function
ignoreOutgoingRequestHook	IgnoreOutgoingRequestFunction	Http instrumentation will not trace all outgoing requests that matched with custom function
serverName	string	The primary server name of the matched virtual host.
requireParentforOutgoingSpans	Boolean	Require that is a parent span to create new span for outgoing requests.
requireParentforIncomingSpans	Boolean	Require that is a parent span to create new span for incoming requests.
headersToSpanAttributes	object	List of case insensitive HTTP headers to convert to span attributes. Client (outgoing requests, incoming responses) and server (incoming requests, outgoing responses) headers will be converted to span attributes in the form of http.{request|response}.header.header_name, e.g. http.response.header.content_length

The following options are deprecated:

Options	Type	Description
ignoreIncomingPaths	IgnoreMatcher[]	Http instrumentation will not trace all incoming requests that match paths
ignoreOutgoingUrls	IgnoreMatcher[]	Http instrumentation will not trace all outgoing requests that match urls

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

License

Apache 2.0 - See LICENSE for more information.