Agent Configuration

Configuring the agent

The agent is highly configurable, either by:

• Passing it configuration properties from the CLI
• Setting environment variables

Configuration properties

Here’s an example of agent configuration via configuration properties:

opentelemetry-instrument \
    --traces_exporter console,otlp \
    --metrics_exporter console \
    --service_name your-service-name \
    --exporter_otlp_endpoint 0.0.0.0:4317 \
    python myapp.py

Here’s an explanation of what each configuration does:

• traces_exporter specifies which trace exporter to use. In this case, traces are being exported to console (stdout) and to otlp. The otlp option tells opentelemetry-instrument to send it to an endpoint that accepts OTLP via gRPC. The full list of available options for traces_exporter can be found here.

• otlp used above for traces_exporter is the equivalent of using otlp_proto_grpc. To send traces via HTTP instead of gRPC, replace otlp_proto_grpc (or otlp) with otlp_proto_http.

• metrics_exporter specifies which metrics exporter to use. In this case, metrics are being exported to console (stdout). It is currently required for your to specify a metrics exporter. If you aren’t exporting metrics, specify none as the value instead.

• service_name sets the name of the service associated to the trace, and is sent to your Observability back-end.

• exporter_otlp_endpoint tells opentelemetry-instrument to send the traces to the given Observability back-end’s endpiont via gRPC, or directly to the OpenTelemetry Collector.

• exporter_otlp_headers is required depending on your chosen Observability back-end. More info exporter OTLP headers be found here.

• If exporter_otlp_endpoint is omitted, the agent assumes that you are using the default Collector gRPC endpoint, 0.0.0.0:4317. The above command is the equivalent of saying:

  opentelemetry-instrument \
  --traces_exporter console,otlp_proto_grpc \
  --metrics_exporter console\
  --service_name your-service-name \
  --exporter_otlp_endpoint 0.0.0.0:4317 \
  --exporter_otlp_insecure true \
  python myapp.py
  

  For HTTP, replace otlp_proto_grpc with otlp_proto_http. If left unspecified, the endpoint is now assumed to be 0.0.0.0:4318 (default Collector HTTP endpoint).

Environment Variables

In some cases, configuring via Environment Variables is more preferred. Any setting configurable with a configuration property can also be configured with an Environment Variable.

You can apply the following steps to determine the correct name mapping of the desired configuration property:

• Convert the configuration property to uppercase.
• Prefix environment variable with OTEL_

For example, exporter_otlp_endpoint would convert to OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_ENDPOINT.

Disabling Specific Instrumentations

The Python agent by default will detect a python program’s packages and instrument any packages it can.
This makes instrumentation easy, but can result in too much or unwanted data.

You can omit specific packages from instrumentation by using the OTEL_PYTHON_DISABLED_INSTRUMENTATIONS environment variable. The environment variable can be set to a comma-separated list of package names to exclude from instrumentation.

For example, if your Python program uses the redis and kafka-python packages, by default the agent will use the opentelemetry-instrumentation-redis and opentelemetry-instrumentation-kafka-python packages to instrument them. To disable this, you can set OTEL_PYTHON_DISABLED_INSTRUMENTATIONS=redis,kafka-python.