lightstep-opentelemetry-launcher-node

Launcher, an OpenTelemetry Configuration Layer 🚀

NOTE: the code in this repo is currently in alpha and will likely change

What is Launcher?

Launcher is a configuration layer that chooses default values for configuration options that many OpenTelemetry users want. It provides a single function in each language to simplify discovery of the options and components available to users. The goal of Launcher is to help users that aren't familiar with OpenTelemetry quickly ramp up on what they need to get going and instrument.

Getting started

npm i lightstep-opentelemetry-launcher-node

Configure

Minimal setup

const {
  lightstep,
  opentelemetry,
} = require('lightstep-opentelemetry-launcher-node');

const sdk = lightstep.configureOpenTelemetry({
  accessToken: 'YOUR ACCESS TOKEN',
  serviceName: 'locl-ex',
});

sdk.start().then(() => {
  const tracer = opentelemetry.trace.getTracer('otel-node-example');
  const span = tracer.startSpan('test-span');
  span.end();

  opentelemetry.trace.getTracerProvider().getActiveSpanProcessor().shutdown();
});

Configuration Options

Config Option	Env Variable	Required	Default
serviceName	LS_SERVICE_NAME	y	-
serviceVersion	LS_SERVICE_VERSION	n	unknown
spanEndpoint	OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_SPAN_ENDPOINT	n	https://ingest.lightstep.com:443/api/v2/otel/trace
metricEndpoint	OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_METRIC_ENDPOINT	n	https://ingest.lightstep.com:443/metrics
accessToken	LS_ACCESS_TOKEN	n	-
logLevel	OTEL_LOG_LEVEL	n	info
propagators	OTEL_PROPAGATORS	n	b3
resource	OTEL_RESOURCE_LABELS	n	-

Additional Options

In addition the options below, the configureOpenTelemetry function will take any configuration options supported by the OpenTelemetry Node SDK package and its return value is a NodeSDK instance. See the OpenTelemetry Node SDK documentation for more details.

Principles behind Launcher

100% interoperability with OpenTelemetry

One of the key principles behind putting together Launcher is to make lives of OpenTelemetry users easier, this means that there is no special configuration that requires users to install Launcher in order to use OpenTelemetry. It also means that any users of Launcher can leverage the flexibility of configuring OpenTelemetry as they need.

Opinionated configuration

Although we understand that not all languages use the same format for configuration, we find this annoying. We decided that Launcher would allow users to use the same configuration file across all languages. In this case, we settled for YAML as the format, which was inspired by the OpenTelemetry Collector.

Validation

Another decision we made with launcher is to provide end users with a layer of validation of their configuration. This provides us the ability to give feedback to our users faster, so they can start collecting telemetry sooner.

Start using it today in Go, Java, Javascript and Python and let us know what you think!

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Made with @ Lightstep

Changelog

0.10.2

• Initial release