Custom Instrumentation of Java Applications with the OpenTelemetry API

Support for custom instrumenting your application using the OpenTelemetry API and sending the spans to Datadog is in beta.

If your code is custom instrumented with the OpenTelemetry (OTel) API, you can configure it to generate Datadog-style spans and traces to be processed by the Datadog tracing library for your language, and send those to Datadog.

The Datadog tracing library, when configured as described here, accepts the spans and traces generated by OTel-instrumented code, processes the telemetry, and sends it to Datadog. You can use this approach, for example, if your code has already been instrumented with the OTel API, or if you want to instrument using the OTel API, and you want to gain the benefits of using the Datadog tracing libraries without changing your code.

If you’re looking for a way to instrument your code with OpenTelemetry and then send span data to Datadog without going through the Datadog tracing library, see OpenTelemetry in Datadog.

Requirements and limitations

  • Datadog Java tracing library dd-trace-java version 1.10.0 or greater.

The following OTel features implemented in the Datadog library as noted:

FeatureSupport notes
OTel Context propagationDatadog distributed header format is used instead.
Span processorsUnsupported
Span ExportersUnsupported
Trace/span ID generatorsID generation is performed by ddtrace.

Configuring OTel to use the Datadog tracing library

  1. Add your desired manual OTel instrumentation to your Java code following the OTel Java Manual Instrumentation documentation.
  2. Add the Datadog tracing library to the JVM.
  3. Set the dd.trace.otel.enabled system property to true.

Datadog combines these OpenTelemetry spans with other Datadog APM spans into a single trace of your application.

Further Reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

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