Instrumentation Autoload

[dyladan]

Per the call today, we would like to be able to configure instrumentations like this:

const { registerInstrumentations } = require("@opentelemetry/instrumentation");
const instrumentations = require("@opentelemetry/instrumentations-node-core")

const MyPlugin = require("my-plugin") // old plugin
const MyInstrumentation = require("my-instrumentation") // new instrumentation

registerInstrumentations({
    instrumentations: [...instrumentations, MyPlugin, MyInstrumentation],
    // optional - use globals by default
    tracerProvider: ...,
    meterProvider: ...,
}),

[Flarna]

Should this be api.register()?
Or is sdk some new component?

[vmarchaud]

@Flarna I recall that we didn't define where this should be exposed, althrough i believe this should be either on tracing/metrics sdk or on a highlever component like the current node-sdk

[dyladan]

@Flarna the sdk component is just a wrapper around the sdk components you're already familiar with which handles startups with default options.

edit: as pointed out by @vmarchaud the code example here isn't really meant to be specific and is more about the loading pattern. It could very well be the tracer provider or something.

[Flarna]

I think one of the targets of OTel is to keep the SDK interchangeable therefore it should be in some interface component an not in a concrete implementation of one SDK.

[dyladan]

These are exclusive concepts. The instrumentation will still be useable by other sdks, and the "sdk module" is just a helper which wraps the api calls. Any sdk implementation would need to reimplement it. If a user specifically depends on @opentelemetry/node-sdk, they are not using a third party sdk.

[Flarna]

Would it be possible to move this implementation into the instrumentation package? This would avoid that every SDK vendor has to re-implement the same functionality.

[dyladan]

I don't see any reason why it couldn't live in the instrumentation package.

[dyladan]

@obecny after this change is there any reason to have web and node packages? The plugin loading is the only difference and if we can move it into the instrumentation package then we can remove those packages entirely.

[obecny]

@dyladan are you referring to opentelemetry-node and opentelemetry-web ?

[dyladan]

yes. With the new instrumentation it should be possible to remove them

[obecny]

In web there are some utils that are being used by few plugins. In node there is default context manager already defined which is quite convenient for the end user. Based on this I don't see a good place for utils from web and then forcing the user to choose the context manager everytime. Now you just make sure you get the correct TracerProvider and thats it.