otel

OpenTelemetry API for R packages and projects

OpenTelemetry is an observability framework. OpenTelemetry is a collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs used to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data such as metrics, logs, and traces, for analysis in order to understand your software’s performance and behavior.

For an introduction to OpenTelemetry, see the OpenTelemetry website docs.

To learn how to instrument your R code, see Getting Started. For project status, installation instructions and more, read on.

Features

• Lightweight packages. otel is a small R package without dependencies and compiled code. otelsdk needs a C++11 compiler and otel.
• Minimal performance impact when tracing is disabled. otel functions do not evaluate their arguments in this case.
• Zero-code instrumentation support. Add tracing to (some) functions of selected packages automatically.
• Configuration via environment variables.
• Minimal extra code. Add tracing to a function with a single extra function call.
• Production mode: otel functions do not crash your production app in production mode.
• Development mode: otel functions error early in development mode.

Getting started

Set otel_tracer_name to the desired tracer name. (See ?otel_tracer_name.) Then add otel::start_local_active_span() calls to the functions you want to trace:

otel_tracer_name <- "<package-id>"
fn <- function(...) {
  spn <- otel::start_local_active_span("fn")
  ...
}

See Getting Started for details.

The otel and otelsdk R packages

Use the otel package as a dependency if you want to instrument your R package or project for OpenTelemetry.

Use the otelsdk package to produce OpenTelemetry output from an R package or project that was instrumented with the otel package.

Reference Documentation

• otel: https://otel.r-lib.org/reference/
• otelsdk: https://otelsdk.r-lib.org/reference/

Status

The current status of the major functional components for OpenTelemetry R is as follows:

Version support

otel and otelsdk support R 3.6.0 and higher on Unix and R 4.3.0 or higher on Windows.

Installation

Install otel from CRAN:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("otel")

You can install the development version of otel from GitHub with:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("r-lib/otel")

Repositories

• otel: https://github.com/r-lib/otel
• otelsdk: https://github.com/r-lib/otelsdk

License

MIT © Posit, PBC