Trace Collection Through OpenTelemetry

Overview

If your applications and services are instrumented with OpenTelemetry libraries, you can choose how to get the tracing data to the Datadog backend:

  1. Send traces to the OpenTelemetry collector, and use the Datadog exporter to forward them to Datadog, or

  2. Ingest traces with the Datadog Agent, which collects them for Datadog.

Read OpenTelemetry for more information.

Beta: Custom Instrumentation for Datadog Libraries
For some supported languages, you can configure OTel instrumented applications to use the Datadog tracing library to process spans and traces. For more information, read Custom Instrumentation with the OpenTelemetry API.

Connect OpenTelemetry traces and logs

You can correlate OpenTelemetry traces and logs so that your application logs monitoring and analysis has the additional context provided by the OpenTelemetry traces. See Connect OpenTelemetry Traces and Logs for language specific instructions and example code.

OpenTracing

Datadog recommends you use the OpenTelemetry Collector Datadog exporter or the OTLP Ingest in the Datadog Agent in conjunction with OpenTelemetry tracing clients. However, if that doesn’t work for you, each of the supported languages also has support for sending OpenTracing data to Datadog. Read more about setting up OpenTracing for each supported language.

Set up your application to send traces using OpenTracing.


Further Reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

Collector documentationOPENTELEMETRY more more Connect OpenTelemetry Traces and LogsDOCUMENTATION more more Send metrics, traces, and logs from OpenTelemetry Collector to Datadog using Datadog ExporterBLOG more more