Using the OpenTelemetry Operator to Inject Auto-Instrumentation

If you run your Python service in Kubernetes, you can take advantage of the OpenTelemetry Operator to inject auto-instrumentation without having to modify each of your services directly. See the OpenTelemetry Operator Auto-instrumentation docs for more details.

Python-specific topics

Libraries with binary wheels

Some Python packages we instrument or need in our instrumentation libraries, might ship with some binary code. This is the case, for example, of grpcio and psutil (used in opentelemetry-instrumentation-system-metrics).

The binary code is tied to a specific C library version (glibc or musl) and to a specific Python version. The OpenTelemetry Operator provides images for a single Python version based on the glibc C library. If you want to use it you might need to build your own image operator Docker image for Python auto-instrumentation.

Since operator v0.113.0 it is possible to build an image with both glibc and musl based auto-instrumentation and configure it at runtime.

Django applications

Applications that run from their own executable like Django requires to set in your deployment file two environment variables:

• PYTHONPATH, with the path to the Django application root directory, e.g. “/app”
• DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE, with the name of the Django settings module, e.g. “myapp.settings”