Ingest Your First Traces

This guide shows how to instrument a Python application with OpenTelemetry and send traces to the Observability Stack.

Install dependencies

pip install opentelemetry-api opentelemetry-sdk opentelemetry-exporter-otlp

Configure the exporter

from opentelemetry import trace
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace import TracerProvider
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace.export import BatchSpanProcessor
from opentelemetry.exporter.otlp.proto.grpc.trace_exporter import OTLPSpanExporter

# Point to the OTel Collector
exporter = OTLPSpanExporter(endpoint="http://localhost:4317", insecure=True)

provider = TracerProvider()
provider.add_span_processor(BatchSpanProcessor(exporter))
trace.set_tracer_provider(provider)

tracer = trace.get_tracer("my-app")

Create spans

with tracer.start_as_current_span("handle-request") as span:
    span.set_attribute("http.method", "GET")
    span.set_attribute("http.url", "/api/users")

    with tracer.start_as_current_span("query-database") as child:
        child.set_attribute("db.system", "postgresql")
        # your database query here

Verify in Dashboards

1. Open http://localhost:5601.
2. Go to Observability > Traces.
3. Search for your trace by name or filter by time range.
4. Click a trace to see the span tree, timing, and attributes.

Next steps

• Create Your First Dashboard
• Send Data — more instrumentation options