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OpenTelemetry Beta

Welcome to AppSignal's OpenTelemetry beta! In this beta, we aim to improve our support for the OpenTelemetry protocol, enabling us to extend our monitoring capabilities to more programming languages. This will allow you to send tracing and metric data to AppSignal directly via OpenTelemetry, rather than relying on an AppSignal integration.

Please note: The OpenTelemetry beta is distinct from the legacy partial OpenTelemetry support available in our AppSignal integrations for Node.js, Python, and Go. AppSignal still offers this limited integration for Go applications, For more information about our please refer to our Go OpenTelemetry integration specific OpenTelemetry documentation.

This beta should not be relied upon to monitor critical infrastructure. We make no guarantees of it functioning perfectly.

This beta must not be used to monitor front-end JavaScript applications. We'll update the beta at a later time with proper support for this.

We want your feedback!

Your feedback can help shape the outcome of this beta! If you encounter any issues or have suggestions for improvement, please reach out.

What this beta is intended for

  • Improve our support for OpenTelemetry tracing data. This beta does not focus on OpenTelemetry metrics (which we already support) or OpenTelemetry logging.
  • Expand our support for other languages, supported by OpenTelemetry.
  • Improve the way we report errors, like multiple error support per trace.
  • Improve user experience around performance issue reporting and alerting.
  • Improve our trace viewer. Allow for more context per trace and individual spans. The trace viewer is visible for errors now too.
  • Provide the same level of reporting for OpenTelemetry as our existing integration packages.

What this beta is not intended for

  • It is not production ready yet. Do not solely rely on it to monitor your critical infrastructure.
  • It is not a replacement for the existing AppSignal integrations. Do not uninstall our Ruby, Elixir, Node.js, Python and front-end JavaScript packages to replace it with this beta.
  • It does not provide the whole AppSignal feature set you're used to. Not all the functionality is supported in this beta at this time.
  • It is not as polished as the existing language integrations. Expect not getting notified about new errors, not receiving traces for all endpoints and not receiving metrics from minutely probes that power our magic dashboards.
  • It is not always backwards compatible. We'll release new versions of this beta that are backwards incompatible within this beta, so review this documentation (installation, configuration, etc.) for each upgrade.
  • It does not supporting filtering data. Do not send sensitive parameters, or run it through an OpenTelemetry collector first to sanitize the data.
  • It does not support our span/event breakdown, slow queries and slow requests features.
  • It does not support host metrics. Use our Kubernetes metrics instead.
  • It does not support distributed tracing. We don't have an interface for this.
  • It does not support OpenTelemetry logging.

Interested? Join the beta!

If you've read all of the above and are ready to join this public beta, follow the installation steps.