Instrumenting Your Application with OpenTelemetry ¶

This tutorial shows how to add custom spans and metrics to your application when you are already using OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation in Nais.

Prerequisites ¶

1. Why Add Custom Instrumentation? ¶

Auto-instrumentation provides traces and metrics for supported libraries and frameworks out of the box. However, to gain deeper insight into your business logic, you may want to:

2. Add Custom Spans ¶

Custom spans let you trace important operations in your code. This is useful for tracking business logic, performance bottlenecks, or external calls not covered by auto-instrumentation.

Example in Java:

import io.opentelemetry.api.trace.Span;
import io.opentelemetry.api.trace.Tracer;
import io.opentelemetry.api.GlobalOpenTelemetry;

public class MyService {
  private static final Tracer tracer = GlobalOpenTelemetry.getTracer("my-app");

  public void doWork() {
    Span span = tracer.spanBuilder("custom-operation").startSpan();
    try {
      // Your business logic here
    } finally {
      span.end();
    }
  }
}

Other languages: See the OpenTelemetry documentation for language-specific APIs.

3. Add Custom Metrics ¶

Custom metrics help you track application-specific events, counters, or timings. These metrics are exported to Prometheus and visualized in Grafana.

Example in Java:

import io.opentelemetry.api.metrics.Meter;
import io.opentelemetry.api.metrics.GlobalMeterProvider;

public class MyMetrics {
  private static final Meter meter = GlobalMeterProvider.getMeter("my-app");

  // Example: Counter
  private static final LongCounter myCounter = meter
    .counterBuilder("my_custom_counter")
    .setDescription("A custom counter for my app")
    .build();

  public void recordEvent() {
    myCounter.add(1);
  }
}

Other languages: See the OpenTelemetry metrics documentation for details.

4. Deploy and Verify ¶

Next Steps ¶

For more details, see the OpenTelemetry documentation.